


Journey of the Empire

by Omorka



Series: The Books of the Last Gunslinger [2]
Category: Atop the Fourth Wall, That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome, The Spoony Experiment
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Minor Violence, Multi, some blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 05:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7347799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Next-to-the-last of the Noble Order of Gunslingers has fulfilled the requirements of his quest; now he and his traveling companions must figure out how to restore order to the remnants of the galactic empire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Journey of the Empire

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to "Quest of the Cosmic Gunslinger." This will be part 2 of 3 in this series.

The Master of the Arsenal of the Holy Order of the Paladins of Zord stood on the great concrete plains of the spaceport of the Grand Fortress, his cape streaming behind him in a gentle breeze as he surveyed their mighty space fleet. “Huh,” he said, frowning.

“It’s like I said,” Todd of the Shadow Knights warned him, “even after just three years, you have enough frost heave, rain damage, and weeds to make the runways nearly unusable.”

Linkara nodded in wry agreement. “I might have to make some updates to the maintenance programs before we leave.”

“You’re welcome to ride up to the orbital battle station in my ship,” Jaeris, the Next-to-Last Gunslinger, offered. “It’ll be a little tight, but there’s room for three.”

“I can fold up in the back,” Film Brain agreed. “I’m fairly flexible.”

“I can’t do that,” Linkara explained. “The Floating Fortress won’t allow any ship that isn’t a Paladin fighter, destroyer, or warship on board. To get to the _Nimue_ , I need at least one of our ships.” He surveyed the field, blinking against the afternoon sun. “Maybe that one over there?” he hazarded, pointing across a large concrete expanse to a hangar whose runway seemed reasonably clear.

They ambled over. Wildflowers and tufts of grass shoved their way through the cracks in the pavement at every opportunity; for a moment, Jaeris was reminded of the weeds and reedy sprouts that were the first signs of life to appear in the disintegrated battlefields of his homeworld. The ecosystem always tried to reclaim what belonged to it, no matter what had taken the land away; Zord I and Mellotron III were no different in that regard.

“How did the Fortress feed itself?” he blurted. “There were dining halls for thousands in there.”

Linkara pointed off to the east. “There’s a huge farming community off that way,” he said, “and then ranches to the north and northeast. It’s all good farmland. The civilized area of Zord is almost a third of this continent, actually.” He paused, looking uncomfortable. “Or, it was.”

Todd tilted his head to one side. “How many people did you send away?” he asked.

“Counting the uninitiated acolytes, who technically are supposed to return when the Council wakes up? Three million, four hundred twenty-seven thousand, six hundred and forty-two,” Linkara replied. He shook his head. “It was a real logistical mess, too, exporting them to other colonies without creating an immigration crisis. I was in favor of letting them stay as long as they never tried to leave, but Sir Aolus made a pretty convincing case that we couldn’t hold children who were born after the decision to that promise. At least some of them would reach adulthood before we came out of stasis.”

“There wasn’t any way you could also let them leave as long as they never tried to come back?” Film Brain asked.

“Part of the point was that no one who knew we were in cryostasis could ever have the opportunity to tell anyone off-world,” Linkara said as they approached the hangar. “Even the acolytes and the dedicant Squires didn’t know the whole plan. They think we’re trying to deepen our psi techniques in preparation for the coming conflict.” He pressed his palm to the printplate beside the door and removed his glasses for a retina scan. “Which I suppose is true, to some extent,” he admitted. “We were supposed to attempt to astral project while we were in hibersleep, so we could keep tabs on galactic events. I’ve never been very good at it. I’m pretty sure I was just dreaming like normal.” The light next to the small side door blinked green, and he tugged it open, holding it for the others.

Film Brain paused just inside the door. “I don’t know if I dream anymore,” he said wistfully. “If I do, I never remember the dreams.”

“You should, assuming you still sleep,” Todd noted. “It’s a brain thing, and you’ve still got that.” He glanced around the hangar. “Your maintenance bots are doing a better job in here than in the fortress,” he observed to Linkara, then turned back to Film Brain. “Learning to lucid dream and recall our dreams was part of our training,” he said. “I could give you some pointers.”

“Ours, too,” Linkara said, pressing his hand to the featureless glass of a control panel. It lit up and blinked; he frowned and swiped at one of the flashing lights. “It’s one of the first steps in learning to astral project, among other things.”

“It’s optional for us, except for our specialized precogs,” Jaeris said. “They have to learn it so they can tell the prophetic dreams from the random ones. I just did the basic course.” He turned around slowly; the hangar’s lights were starting to flicker on. Six angular one-man fighters all faced the front; they had a mass-produced look to them, identical and undecorated, but their ion engines looked like they packed a punch.

Film Brain cocked his head and looked at each of them sideways. “Why are you telling each other that?” he asked. “I thought the Orders worked like mad to keep their secrets from each other.”

Todd shrugged. “I don’t see any reason to do that anymore,” he admitted. “I’m not a great teacher. Even if I were interested in reviving the order alone, and I’m really not, I don’t know if I could. Might as well not have everything die with me, you know?”

Jaeris echoed the gesture. “We’re really not all that secretive,” he said. “Never have been; didn’t see much point to it. Either you have the potential for soulbonding, or you don’t, and the same goes for the steady hand. Ain’t much anyone could steal from us.”

“We have plenty of secrets,” Linkara said as he swiped through menus on the control panel. “But they’re mostly about our technology and how it interacts with our psi powers, not about the psi abilities themselves.” He selected an icon, and the lights came on in the fighter closest to the door. A low hum shook the hangar as the ion engines began to warm up after laying three years dormant. “After all,” Linkara continued, “until relatively recently we had lots of people wash out as mere Squires instead of full Paladins, and a fair proportion of them had active psi abilities. One or two of them even founded minor orders of their own.” His nose wrinkled. “That’s one of the reasons we stopped taking so many acolytes. I was lucky I got an audience when I did.” He tapped a series of numbers into another menu; the front wall of the hangar began to roll away.

“And by relatively recently, you mean a century and a half ago,” Todd snorted. “These don’t look like VTOL fighters. Have you forgotten what a mess your runways are?”

“All the ones in this hangar are designed to be able to take off and land on rough terrain,” Linkara explained. “If it’s supposed to be able to manage a pebble beach or a back road, I think it can deal with some frost heave. And I’m really referring to about a hundred years ago, after the Aeon Purge.”

“Yeah, the Aeon Knights were on my list of Orders to look for, but they were pretty low,” Jaeris added. “Right above the Shadow Knights. Sorry, Todd, but we all thought -”

“Don’t apologize,” Todd said. “I wanted it that way. There are several good reasons why I just hauled ass to Twilight and hid, instead of announcing to the galaxy that there was one Shadow Knight left.”

Linkara blinked. “Did you know it was an attack, instead of a random near-luminal asteroid?” he asked. “Because we figured it out, but it took a couple of months.”

“Yup,” Todd replied. He looked away, turning his veiled gaze towards the shadowed corners of the hangar as his fingers curled into loose fists.

Jaeris and Linkara shared a puzzled look, but it was Film Brain who piped up with “How?”

Todd sighed. “Okay, this really is a secret, and I don’t actually expect you to believe me,” he went on, still looking away from them. “But once you’ve shadow-walked enough, a part of you sort of stays in the space-between-spaces. And it’s also sort of a time-between-times, too, although I never really understood the theory behind that part. There’s, ah, an echo there, of all the Shadow Knights who ever mastered the art. And you can kind of commune with them, or at least hear them, if you stand in their shadows and listen hard enough.” 

He swallowed; when he spoke again, his voice sounded tight. “I did go back to Penumbra once, once the meteor crater wasn’t a smoking volcanic hole anymore. It’s a lake now, almost a small ocean. I had to buy an inflatable boat and row out to where the Citadel of Shadow had been. Then I mistimed it and had to wait until sunset, because of course there’s nothing there to cast a shadow anymore.” He shifted in place, speaking to the wall instead of to them. “When I - when I dropped into Shadow, of course they were all there, at least all the older ones - most of the initiates hadn’t made enough of an impression there, I guess - and I guess I thought they’d be angry at me, for not being there, for not dying with the rest of them. I was angry at me, for sure.” Todd’s voice broke, and he pressed one gloved hand against his face through the veil. “Mostly they were glad one of us survived. But the Elder Knights, at least some of them, were pretty sure it was deliberate; they just didn’t know who it was from.” He breathed heavily, then finished, “The Nerd Emperor was near the top of the list of possibilities. But so were Lord Critic, and - sorry - the Paladin Council.”

“What?” Linkara yelped. “But we’d never do anything like that!”

Todd inhaled slowly and exhaled hard, as if he were trying to force himself to calm down. “Your order was perfectly willing to hunt us down when there was an assassination attempt on the last Emperor and we were framed for it,” he pointed out, sounding more calm than he looked.

“If by ‘perfectly willing’ you mean ‘ordered to do so by an Emperor who was technically a member of our order at the time,’ then I suppose you have a point,” Linkara said defensively.

“They did the same thing to us, on the next one,” Jaeris pointed out. “I don’t think it was, you know, personal. When the God-Emperor goes mad, you do what you have to to survive.”

Film Brain ran his fingers over the back of the console Linkara had just left. “How much of that was real?” he asked. “Back home, the God-Emperor is just a bogeyman, a story mothers use to scare their children into behaving better.”

Jaeris smirked. “What, fathers don’t ever need to scare their kids into behaving better?” he asked.

Linkara shot Jaeris a sour look, then replied to Film Brain, “Well, I don’t know what stories they tell on - where is your homeworld, anyway? I don’t think you ever mentioned.”

“I don’t have one,” Film Brain answered, his brows drawn together in puzzlement. “I told you, I’m a cyborg.”

“You don’t stop having a homeworld just because you’ve been borged,” Linkara said, equally puzzled.

“You do in Nostalgia system,” Film Brain murmured, tracing patterns in the dust on the console. “I’m not a person; I’m property. I belong to Stationmaster Zero of Palladium Station, and honestly, I was worried you might decide it was your duty to take me back there.”

Linkara’s face reddened. “I know the Paladins may have a stricter sense of justice than the other orders,” he growled, “but we have never, ever recognized slavery as legally or morally justifiable, in any system, for any reason. Not for cyborgs, not for clones, not for prisoners of war - _never_.” 

“Technically,” Jaeris offered, “the way we got off Palladium is that someone - I’m guessing it’s your Stationmaster Zero - sold you to me. Not that, you know, I think I own you or anything, because that’s not legal or right where I come from, either.”

Film Brain stared at him. “You never told me that,” he said dully.

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” Jaeris explained. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re your own person. You can’t own people where I come from, either.” Something about Linkara’s protestation was making him feel vaguely ill; was enslaving clones and war prisoners common elsewhere in the galaxy, too? Had galactic civilization fallen so very far into cruelty and decadence since the Golden Age?

Linkara’s face softened as he turned to face Film Brain directly. “Wait, you’re from Nostalgia system, and you said you used to work for Lord Critic, right?” he asked. “How did you get borged again?”

“Lord Critic killed me,” Film Brain sighed. “I asked too many questions, so he shot me. It was my own fault, really.” He wrung his hands and shuddered, eyes half-closed and unfocused.

“That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard!” Todd exploded. “I know the Critics can be thoughtlessly cruel - believe me, I’ve been on the receiving end of some of that myself. It wasn’t my fault then, and it’s not your fault now, or ever. Shooting someone and then borging them against their will is not an appropriate response to someone asking questions, no matter how annoying they are.”

Linkara’s eyes were wide as he closed the gap between himself and the trembling cyborg. “Wait, Lord Critic shot you? Personally?”

“Yes,” Film Brain moaned, wrapping his arms around himself. “I really don’t want to talk about it right now. It’s - not a pleasant memory.”

“I can’t imagine it would be,” Linkara assured him. “Look, hold up your hand.” He demonstrated, holding his right hand palm out at shoulder height and his left hand over his heart.

Film Brain blinked wetly at him, then imitated the gesture.

Linkara kept his right hand up and moved his left to be palm-up in front of him. “Do you solemnly swear to follow the civil and criminal laws of Zord, to participate in the civic life of your township, and to accept the Paladins of Zord as your liege-lords?”

“Is that really a good -” Jaeris started, but he was interrupted by Todd’s elbow in his ribs.

“You’ll have me?” Film Brain whispered.

“Of course we will.” Linkara smiled at him. “Cyborgs and clones are full citizens on Zord, and always have been.”

“Then yes, yes, of course I’ll swear!” Film Brain yelped.

“Then by the power vested in me by the High Council of the Paladins of Zord, I pronounce you a Zordian citizen, with all the rights and privileges of citizenship,” Linkara stated proudly. He shifted position and brought his and Film Brain’s left hands to the front of the console. “Computer,” he announced, “by my authority, please register our new citizen.”

“Acknowledged,” said a mechanical voice beneath the panel. “Citizen’s name?”

Film Brain swallowed. “First name Film, last name Brain,” he said in a shaky voice.

“You’re not going to use your old name?” Jaeris asked.

“No,” Film Brain answered, “I’ve thought of that version of me as dead for a long time. It would feel strange to go back to that, now. It’s not as if anyone other than Todd knows me from then, and we were only vaguely acquainted.” He looked up, eyes wide. “Honestly, now that I’ve seen Lord Critic and his organization from the outside, I’m more than a little ashamed of what the old me did.”

Jaeris’s mouth twitched a little. He wanted to reassure Film Brain that it was all right, that he hadn’t known, but honestly, Jaeris wasn’t sure that was true. What he finally said was, “I don’t think any of us hold any of that against you.”

“I didn’t think you did,” Film Brain replied. “But I think if I were in your place, I might.”

Linkara smiled and swiped at the control panel again; the console switched off. “I think the fighter’s just about ready,” he said. “Give me a bit of head start; I’ll probably need to give the Floating Fortress permission for you to take up a holding pattern while I get the _Nimue_ ready for flight.” He headed towards the sharp wedge-shaped craft. 

Jaeris glanced beneath it. Sure enough, the landing gear had much broader, tougher-looking tires than a stock fighter would have had. Jaeris hoped it had a suspension to match the tires. “Sounds good,” he said. “Are you taking your new citizen, or is Film Brain coming with me?”

“Just because I’m a citizen doesn’t mean I’m allowed on the Floating Fortress,” Film Brain answered, as Linkara nodded in agreement. “I’d better come with you.”

“Then let’s clear out of his takeoff path,” Jaeris said. Todd was already heading for the open bay doors on silent feet.

\---

“Please maintain your holding pattern,” said yet another automated voice from the radio. “The Paladins have been notified of your presence and will be with you shortly.”

“Tell him to hurry up,” Todd grumbled from the speaker.

Film Brain sat up straighter in the co-pilot’s seat. “There’s a text-only message coming in,” he announced just as a green light started blinking on Jaeris’s console. Jaeris grunted in acknowledgement and flicked a switch.

 _APOLOGIES. TAKING LONGER THAN I EXPECTED TO RUN THE CHECKLIST. ENGINES STARTING FROM COLD._ The words ran across the screen in amber characters rather than white; Jaeris briefly wondered how the Paladin had done that.

“Tell him we’re fine with waiting; we’d just like to know about how long it’ll be,” Jaeris said over his shoulder in Film Brain’s direction.

“While we’re waiting for Sir Fancypants, we should probably figure out where we’re going next,” Todd suggested. “I mean, heading straight back to Mellotron without a plan doesn’t seem like it’d be much help in the overall scheme of things.”

“No, you’re absolutely right,” Jaeris agreed. “But I’d kinda wanted to discuss this with Linkara, since we’re hitching a ride on his ship and all.”

“So the overall plan is to neutralize both Lord Critic and the Nerd Emperor, right?” Todd asked. “That means we need to have some way of either forcing them to confront each other before they’re ready, and hope they burn each other out enough that we can contain them afterwards - sort of the Paladins’ initial plan, but rush the timeline along - or we need to be able to neutralize their big weapons, the disintegrator beam and the asteroid cannon. Or both. Both would probably be better.”

A burst of static crackled over the radio. “Okay, I at least have the comm systems functional,” Linkara announced. “And I’d feel safer if we worked on the second part of that plan first. You wouldn’t believe the amount of reprogramming I’ve had to do on the security systems just to get the meteor defenses fully back online. Whoever hacked the system made a heck of a mess.”

Film Brain nodded. “Mostly they just cut out sections of code,” he noted, “but in some cases they just made it inaccessible, and in others they seem to have deleted it entirely, and it’s not always clear when they did which. I didn’t get the impression they were a very good hacker; they certainly weren’t very subtle.”

Jaeris rubbed his temples; this was turning into something larger than he’d ever imagined. “I just want Mellotron to be safe,” he mumbled. “I talked a good game, but really, I wasn’t trying to save the whole galaxy, just my planet.”

“Except that you knew going into it that your planet wouldn’t ever be safe with Lord Critic still knocking around,” Film Brain murmured, not quite loud enough for the microphone to pick him up. “You may not have signed up to defeat the Nerd Emperor, but you knew Lord Critic had to be stopped for good.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Jaeris sighed, “but this feels so huge now. It’s just the four of us, and Joanna and the dedicants back on the home front. I didn’t think this through enough.”

“You think you’re having second thoughts? I didn’t even have a planet to save,” Todd complained. “I just want a band, and maybe not to have to hide for my life anymore.”

“Not quite true,” Linkara answered. “The oaths you took as a Shadow Knight include protecting the populace from tyranny, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” Todd admitted. “We were originally founded as a resistance movement. It’s still in the DNA of the organization. Not that we were particularly passionate about it, but it’s part of the job.” The radio was silent for a moment, then he continued, “So your angle is entirely self-preservation, Linkara?”

“As a representative of the High Council, I have to say yes,” Linkara said formally. “We cannot take sides in any conflict between plausibly legitimate claimants to the imperial throne, and both the Nerd Emperor and Lord Critic have at least as good claims as anyone else who’s advanced one.” His voice shifted to a slightly higher pitch. “As an individual Paladin? Nope, I’m in this to see justice done, both against whoever tried to destroy the Fortress and kill the Council, and against the jackass who sold Film Brain into slavery. Is that common on Nostalgia system? Because I’d never heard of it outside the free stations before, and there’s all kinds of trafficking on the sleazier ones of those, not just cyborgs.” Something beeped cheerfully among the background noises.

“I don’t know if I’d call it common,” Film Brain answered. “I’d only known two other people who’d been borged before I died. But everyone on Nostalgia knows a cyborg has no rights.”

“That’s just not right,” Jaeris grumbled. “No wonder Lord Critic can be so casual about wanton destruction, if his home planet is that casual about sentient beings.”

“None of this solves the problem of where we’re going next, though,” Film Brain reminded them.

“True,” Jaeris agreed. “Maybe we could start by trying to find out how the asteroid cannon and the disintegrator ray work? I mean, we already know they both use tremendous amounts of power and take a long time between shots. Do they have any other weaknesses we could exploit?”

“Sounds like a start,” Linkara said. “Hold on just a minute; I think the engine reset is just about done. I should be mobile shortly, and we can finish this conversation on board and face-to-face instead of over the radio.” His link went to static and then cut out.

“I’m happy to tell you everything I know,” Film Brain offered, “but really, it’s more the overall pragmatics than the technical details.”

“Right,” Jaeris agreed, “I think we’ll need to do some detective work. Where can we go where someone might know more?”

A pair of bay doors on the lower deck of the Floating Fortress slid silently open, releasing a barely-visible puff of rarefied air. Watching them, Jaeris was suddenly aware of the immense scale of the station; the landing bay could have swallowed the _Stratocaster_ like a gnat.

As the doors reached their widest aperture, a ship glided through into the vacuum of space. If the _Stratocaster_ was a gnat, then this ship was a falcon with folded wings, angular and bristling, ready to strike. It eased into position just past and below them, and its own bay doors opened at the back.

“Park wherever you like,” Linkara said cheerfully as his radio link sprang to life again, with far less static. “There’s plenty of room.”

“I’ll just bet there is,” Jaeris said, less out of irritation than grudging envy.

\---

The _Stratocaster_ , the _Kali_ , the unnamed fighter Linkara had taken from the surface, and a scout ship nearly double the _Stratocaster_ ’s size all fit in the docking bay with room for another dozen fighters, true to Linkara’s word. Of the assembled team, only Jaeris seemed impressed.

“Do the Gunslingers not have warships?” Film Brain asked, as Jaeris tried not to gawp.

“We did, a long time ago,” Jaeris murmured. “Before I was born, much less a Gunslinger myself.”

“Do I want to ask what happened to them?” Film Brain continued.

“Emperor Malachite happened to them, more or less,” Jaeris said. “Or, I guess, the Cloak Regiment happened to them. We’ve relied on small fighters and the occasional orbital platform ever since.” He stopped staring at the vault of the ceiling to turn towards Film Brain. “Does Lord Critic have any? Because if he does, we’ve never seen them.”

“There are two a little smaller than this one that usually dock at Phelous Station,” Film Brain answered. “General Phelous was using them to finish pacifying the Tektopia worlds. That’s why you’ve never seen the third battle platform at Mellotron, by the way; according to the news feeds I found on Zord, at least, he’s still not done.”

The airlock door irised open, and Linkara strode in, clearly happy to be on his own ship again. “Everyone locked down?” he asked.

Todd ducked from behind the _Kali_. “Actually,” he answered, “I can’t get the arti-grav lock activated. Do I need a passcode?”

“You shouldn’t,” Linkara said, puzzled. He turned to a console near the wall and tapped a few icons. “Oh, I see. It’s having trouble sensing the boundaries of the ship. What’s she made of?”

“What, your spies didn’t ever tell you that?” Todd snorted. “Ceramics, mostly. I don’t know the exact composition.”

Linkara frowned, then tapped at the console again. A blue light came on underneath the sleek black shadescout. “That ought to do it for the moment,” Linkara said, “although it might be more stable if you let me do a full sensor sweep.”

“It won’t help,” Todd replied, shrugging. “Do what you want, though; I already said I’m not interested in keeping secrets.”

Linkara shrugged back, and gestured for them to follow him. They exited the docking bay into a tall but narrow corridor lit mostly in pastel green, which made Linkara and Film Brain both look as if they were slightly luminescent and possibly about to be sick; Jaeris suspected he didn’t look any better. Even Todd looked a little pale. Worse, the circuitry under Film Brain’s skin seemed to like the lighting; it was far more obvious than it had been even under Zord’s noonday brightness.

The hallway ended in a rounded cul-de-sac with industrial carpet underfoot instead of the glossy black tile that had composed the floor so far. Linkara pressed his palm to a panel and announced, “Bridge, Nimue.”

“Acknowledged,” answered an artificial voice in a cool alto register. A section of the wall slid around to close the cul-de-sac into a round room, and the artificial gravity wobbled for an instant.

“Is this a turbolift?” Film Brain exclaimed. “It’s huge!”

“It’s specifically the cargo turbolift,” Linkara explained. “You know, for bringing heavy things from the docking bay to the upper decks.”

Film Brain shook his head. “I’ve spent most of my life on stations,” he observed, “and none of them had lifts this large, or this smooth.”

The gravity wobbled again, and the wall slid back to reveal a much larger round room, furnished in brass and bronze but lit in green and gold. Half a dozen personnel stations with hexagonal viewscreens surrounded an oddly understated captain’s chair.

“Since you’re all the crew I have,” Linkara asked, “can I assign you positions? It’ll make getting where we’re going a lot easier on all of us.”

Jaeris raised an eyebrow. “Surely a ship this size needs a crew of at least a couple dozen to be functional?” he said; it wasn’t really a question.

“Normally, it would,” Linkara agreed. “But the _Nimue_ is - special.” He plopped himself unceremoniously into the captain’s chair. “She’s my personal ship,” he added, as if that explained the matter. He pointed towards the two stations in front of him. “Jaeris, would you take the pilot’s chair for me? Film Brain, you can take navigation, and Todd, I want you on weapons.”

Jaeris headed where he was bidden, but Todd balked. “If that’s really where you want me, I’ll do it,” the Shadow Knight said, “but I think Jaeris and I should switch.”

Linkara peered at him over his glasses. “Why?” he asked. “I mean, not to cast aspersions on anyone, but I haven’t seen any particularly fancy flying from you, Todd.”

Todd folded his arms, leaning back against the weapons station. “I don’t have perfect aim,” he pointed out. “The Gunslinger does.”

Linkara blinked. “Wait, is that real?” he blurted. 

Film Brain erupted in giggles and nearly slid out of his seat. “I understand why _I_ keep getting surprised by these things, but -” he gasped, then was caught by another giggle fit before he could finish the thought.

Jaeris allowed himself a chuckle. “Yeah,” he agreed, “it’s real. That’s not to say other things can’t spoil it - heat distortion, gravity waves, flaws in the weaponry - but if we get a chance to aim, the target’s hit.” He grinned, pushed his hat back on his head slightly, and patted the hilt of his gun.

A burst of white light flared across his vision, and suddenly -

\---

“Dude - I mean, Miz Joanna? Miz Joanna, wake up!” The youth shaking her out of her bunk couldn’t be more than seventeen years old, eighteen at the outside.

Joanna checked to make sure she was wearing a shirt. She was; in fact, she didn’t seem to have shucked yesterday’s clothes at all. Probably for the best. Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, she searched for her shoes and asked, “What’s the situation?”

“We’ve got incoming,” the kid said. “A flight of fighters, looks like it’s about twenty.” He was wearing a pair of infrared shades for night vision; that must be why he hadn’t bothered turning the light on. That didn’t explain the orange ball cap, but one thing at a time.

“Fighters?” Joanna grabbed her boots and yanked the left one on. “That’s stupid; why would they send that many fighters down through atmosphere without a disintegrator volley first?”

“Maybe they figure we’re vulnerable without the _Stratocaster_?” asked a sleepy voice from further back in the bunker. Lise stumbled forwards, still in her nightshirt and slippers.

“Not much more than we were before,” Joanna sniffed. “It ain’t all that well armed; it’s just fast as lightning.” She tugged her other boot on and buckled her gun belt. “Anyone manning the artillery?”

“The auxiliary night crew sent Pup up on the mountainside one,” the kid explained. “We figured you’d want the low one, if it came to actual shooting!” He was far too excited about this; he must be a new recruit. At least, she didn’t recognize him.

“Figured right,” Joanna agreed. “You’re a driver, right? Get the train warmed up.” The kid nodded and disappeared into the darkness.

Lise stripped off her nightshirt and fumbled in the communal trunk for a blouse. “It’s not having another ‘Slinger’s got us in a bind,” she sighed. “Not so much not having the ship.”

Joanna let Lise shrug her shirt on, then grabbed her gently by the shoulders. “Lise,” she said quietly as she looked the younger woman in the eyes, “you are nearly as good a Gunslinger as Jaeris and I are, okay? You’re even training most of the dedicants. You’ve got to have faith in yourself.”

“Ain’t a lack of faith,” Lise said vaguely. “I just - a bond’s forever, and I just -”

“You don’t want to give the first part of your soul to the blaster, I know,” Joanna said quickly. Lise’s eyes went wide, and Joanna couldn’t repress a small grin. “Hon, you’re a better precog than either of us are, and you’ll get the hang of the perfect aim meditation any day now. You thought we didn’t know why you held back?”

Lise’s face burned beet red as she yanked on a pair of jeans and shoved her feet into running shoes. “It’s stupid,” she blurted. “I know perfectly well it won’t make the bond with - with whoever it ends up being, any less special.”

“You’re right,” Joanna said bluntly. “It won’t. But the knowing and the doing are two different things, and you can’t force a soulbond with the gun or a person before you’re ready.” She patted Lise on the shoulder. “And when you’re ready, there’ll be three Gunslingers left in the galaxy. In the meantime, let’s get me to the big guns before the fighters do any damage.”

The train ride was short and taken in near-silence. The underground tunnels were the only forms of transportation that hadn’t been fragmented beyond usability by the disintegrator beam or bombing sorties, so they’d expanded them far beyond their original capacity. The kid was steering and didn’t have much to say; Lise stared out the window, peering into the darkness as if she were willing a vision into existence. Joanna checked her mobile datapad; the reception down here was terrible, but the little radar she was getting showed three groups of six blips descending through the upper atmosphere towards an unknown target. Probably them.

“They’re not even trying to layer themselves to confuse our aim,” Joanna mused out loud. “Either they’re trying to come in quick and get out just as quick, or they think we’re out of ammo.”

“Both,” Lise said, her eyes half-glazed. “They know Jaeris is gone. They think he’s the leader.”

“Then their chauvinistic asses will get exactly what’s coming to them,” Joanna said as the train came to a halt. “You okay? You look like you’re trying to force it. That doesn’t work with the second-sight any better than it does anything else.”

Lise shook her head hard enough to whip her braid around. “More like I feel it just out of reach,” she mumbled. “Wanna get it over with.”

“Keep it cool,” Joanna ordered. “We need you to get to Pup in one piece and still conscious, in case he needs to swap out. No psychic heroics, got it?”

“Might not be able to help it,” Lise admitted. “If it breaks, it feels like it might be a big one.”

Joanna ran a hand down her face. “Kid, what’s your name?” she demanded of the driver.

“Evelyn,” he said, adjusting his night-vision shades.

“Okay, Ev - can I call you Ev? - I need you to get Lise to the mountainside, but if she pops her gasket, the first thing you do is get a recording device under her, and then second, you get her to whoever’s running the infirmary at the aux station up there instead of straight to the gun mount, got it?” Joanna’s mouth was dry. Lise’s good prophesies were usually subtle things, flashes over coffee or glimpsed in a bonfire. The ones that hit her like a seizure and laid her low were almost always the bad ones.

“You can call me whatever you want, Miz Joanna,” Evelyn said, glancing back nervously at Lise as she shivered. “And I’ll do my best.”

“Couldn’t ask for better, Ev.” Joanna nodded a curt farewell to Lise, then charged up the stairs to the gun mount. The first rays of dawn fanned across the horizon as she emerged from the stairwell and darted the few unprotected feet to the door.

A pair of acolytes were getting things warmed up; the power grid was flaky here, held together with tape and baling wire after repeated bombings, but everything seemed to be running smoothly for the moment. Joanna exchanged mumbled greetings to the acolytes and the dedicant behind the ops panel, and climbed into the chair of the ion turret.

Pup was already in place; there was a message waiting for her on the console. _Ready to kick some Critic-kissing ass?_

 _Ready as ever,_ she typed back, and strapped in. She could feel her adrenalin rising; not really what she wanted. She was a better shooter when she was cool and collected than when she was hotdogging on a tank full of rage.

The scanners showed the first wave just dipping below the high cloud bank, glinting in the rosy light. Time to show off; she took several minutes tracking with the big gun, then squeezed off two bursts. Their lead and left guard both exploded; clean hits to the engines, and these dipsnots didn’t even have shields up. Maybe these fighters were too small to have shield generators; they definitely didn’t have hyperdrives.

The second wave broke to the right and curved off. Not gaining altitude, so not leaving the fight yet; probably wanting to try and flank. Pup would have a clearer shot than she would in a few minutes.

Her third, fourth, and sixth shots were also direct hits; three more fighters down. What did these guys think they were pulling?

Pup came in, guns barking, and finally she saw the golden flare of shields coming up. The lights in the turret dimmed. Joanna roared into the headset, “Did they hit a power station?”

“Negative!” called back the dedicant in the operations chair. “They’ve got a vampire shield generator! It’s sucking power from our transmissions systems to shield the whole flight at once!”

“Seriously?” Joanna spent precious seconds zooming in on the third wave as they entered the scan field. Sure enough, one of their ships had the dome on the back that meant either a self-repair kit or a massive shield generator, one big enough for a couple dozen ships. That they were using one of those instead of shielding the individual ships probably meant that either parts or fuel reserves on the orbital station were running low, and that was useful information in its own right, but not likely to be helpful in the immediate fight.

Joanna put two ion bursts under the battery ship’s engines. They bounced right off the shields.

The console chattered. _Shields are too strong while they’re drawing power,_ Pup told her. _Pick off the ones on the edge, they’ll have the least coverage from the shield generator._

“Nope,” she said quietly. “They don’t care if they lose the sacrificial lambs; they already demonstrated that. That generator’s gotta come down.” Carefully, she reached for her holster and slipped the soul blaster into an inconspicuous slot in the ion cannon’s power housing.

“Sorry, Jaeris,” she grunted. “This might sting a little.” If the shield was too strong, it might also leave her open, but she trusted Pup to cover for her until she woke back up. Theirs were Gunslinger souls; they could take it.

The turret blazed, and she could feel her deep self riding the ion burst, moving at nearly the speed of light, right into the golden haze of the grav field of the shields, and -

\---

Jaeris was looking up into Linkara’s upside-down face. The Paladin’s expression was roughly two-thirds concern and one-third fascination.

Film Brain’s was all concern; he was kneeling next to Jaeris and fanning him with a datapad. “Are you all right?” was all he said, despite his wide eyes.

“I’m good,” Jaeris panted. “Joanna needed a piece of me for a moment.” He tried to sit up, but the bridge swam and swirled around him; the floor would be fine for a moment longer.

Todd’s boots and cape swished past on the floor just above his head. “Is she okay?” Todd asked.

Jaeris risked closing his eyes and touching the handle of the soul blaster again. It thrummed with their polarity, with echoes of Jaeris’s music and Joanna’s laughter, but it didn’t suck him under again. “She’s not hurt, and it feels like she’s either happy or relieved,” he reported. “Which I think means it worked.”

“What worked?” Linkara and Film Brain had asked in near unison.

Jaeris rolled over on his side and managed to struggle up on one elbow before the vertigo hit him again. “There are ion turrets on top of the boltholes - they used to be underground Gunslinger gymnasiums, but they’ve been converted to bunkers - anyway, there’s a modification that allows a soulbonded Gunslinger to add their soul blaster’s energy to the turret. It’s not really a good idea except as a last resort; you’re using your own soul energy, so a couple of shots will knock you out, and then there’s no one manning the turret. But it lets you pull trick shots that aren’t possible otherwise, and if you’re really good you can even crack a shield, short it out and take it down for a while. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think that’s what Joanna was doing.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples; the impression of speed, of necessity, of sheer stubborn cussedness still rang in his skull, and asking whether the impressions were was his or hers was meaningless, when you got right down to it.

Todd crouched next to him, his cape pooling on the floor like a dark waterfall. “What was she shooting at?” he asked.

“Fighters,” Jaeris said, trying to organize the jumble in his head. This was far less organized than usual; maybe the distance between them was making the connection harder. It had been just as vivid as ever, but making sense of everything that had come bursting through the soul connection was painful, like sorting through hot glass. “Small ones, but they had a - some gadget called a ‘vampire’ shield generator. Any of y’all know what that is? ‘Cause I don’t, but Joanna must have.”

“Something they wouldn’t be using if they weren’t running low on power and fairly confident that your Gunslingers couldn’t stop them,” Film Brain answered. “It’s a device for sucking power out of generators and fusion furnaces without having to touch them, and then using it to run a large grav-field shield for an entire flight of fighters at once - and they can suck and store a lot of energy, quickly. They’re quite useful, but they’re not as flexible as individual shield generators. They’re also both very heavy and very expensive.”

Linkara rubbed his chin. “So,” he asked, “where would Lord Critic buy something like that?”

“I don’t think Lord Critic bought it himself,” Film Brain said as he helped Jaeris up into a chair. “I seem to recall General Snob had two on Gremlin Station.”

“Which would explain why the fighters instead of just using the disintegrator cannon,” Jaeris mused, still supporting his head on one palm as he leaned on the chair. “I bet he wouldn’t have to ask Lord Critic to use them; you said they were based on his station, right?”

“But where did the vampire generators come from?” Linkara pressed. “Did General Snob come up with them himself, or someone in his navy? Because I’ve never heard of those before, either.”

“They probably stole them from Tektopia,” Todd suggested. “Lots of good stuff there, and Lord Critic was looting it for all they were worth.”

“Unless things have changed recently, General Phelous would have most of that,” Film Brain countered. “Lord Critic, and maybe General Snob, too, had another source for high-tech gadgets, like the vampire generators and the disintegrator beam; I always assumed it was someone he knew from Nostalgia system whom I never met because they were above my station.”

Linkara stood up straight and nodded. “Well, that’s a destination, anyway,” he said, turning towards the captain’s chair.

“Wait,” Todd interrupted, “we can’t take Film Brain back to Nostalgia.”

“Why not?” Linkara asked, taking his position and calling up a navigation screen. “By our law, he’s a citizen of Zord. By their law, he’s Jaeris’s property. Either way, they’ve got no claim to him.”

“That still turns my stomach,” Jaeris mumbled. His guts lurched in agreement.

“The last Shadow Knight, the penultimate Gunslinger, and a rare-as-hen’s-teeth Paladin all showing up at Nostalgia system in a badass warship is going to get back to Lord Critic in nanoseconds,” Todd continued arguing. “At least pick a Nostalgian outpost or station instead of the main system; we can do some reconnaissance, get the latest gossip on Lord Critic from his side without having to pick Film Brain’s brain for old news and without tipping our hand completely.”

“He’s got a point,” Jaeris agreed. “Nostalgia system might decide to just blow us out of the sky; even the ones who don’t owe fealty to Lord Critic are likely to support him.”

“I guess.” Linkara scowled and poked at the navigation screen. “What about Avatar Station in Ultima system? It’s on one of the main trading routes out of Nostalgia system, it sees plenty of traffic from there, but technically it’s a free station.”

Film Brain frowned. “There was something weird about Ultima system,” he said, more to himself than the others, “but I don’t remember what it was.”

Jaeris and Todd shared a look. At least, Jaeris thought they did; it was hard to tell through Todd’s veil. “It’s not a great plan,” Todd said, “but my only other thought is to go back to Palladium Station and smack around some of the smugglers until they cough up some info, and I think Avatar Station is a better bet and less dangerous for our cyborg.”

“I can’t argue with any of that,” Jaeris agreed. “Sorry about having a moment, there.”

Linkara shook his head gently. “I don’t quite know what that’s like,” he said, “but I can’t fault you for it, at all.” He glanced around the room. “Tell you what,” he offered, “why don’t you stay there at tactical for the moment. Todd, you can have the pilot’s seat. Film Brain, plot a course for us to Ultima system.”

Jaeris inspected the controls as the others took their positions. The _Nimue_ had over a dozen individual weapons systems, and autofire controls for all but three of them.

Suddenly, he felt a lot safer than Joanna. Good thing she’d have to forgive him later.

\---

“Hey, Miz Joanna! You okay?” The booming voice sounded like it was coming from the other end of a closed culvert.

“Whoo, yeah, I may have pushed too hard on that one.” She pushed herself back upright in the gunner’s seat and blinked. The viewfinder was mostly full of smoke trails; she dialed it back - there, now she could see those punks in the fighters.

There were three fewer of them, and they were heading upwards, out of atmosphere. The shield generator ship and its escort were gone; Pup must have seen the opportunity and taken it. She couldn’t tell where the third missing one had gone - no, wait, there it was, tumbling out of control and heading right for the mountain. It was going to hit well above the other turret’s altitude, but someone should probably make sure it didn’t spark any wildfires.

The dedicant from the ops chair - Archie? Was that his name? no, RC - hustled over. “Looks like the good guys won, for once,” he puffed. “Let’s get you back underground.”

“Gotta do some clean-up first,” she replied. She reached under the console and retrieved her soul blaster; it throbbed like a heartbeat under her fingers, a little too fast.

RC cleared his throat. “Did you - get anything?” he asked, looking like he anticipated having to duck a swing for the question. It was a comical look on him; he was eight inches taller than her and beefy for his size.

Joanna’s head swung up. “Yeah, actually!” She closed her eyes and let her fingers play down the smooth, warm metal of the gun. “Jaeris is - well, as safe as possible under the circumstances. He’s on a - that’s a Paladin warship, I think! He must have found them and convinced them to at least help a little.” 

Opening her eyes again, she saw RC’s brows drawn in confusion. “You’re going to need to learn this eventually, right?” she asked. “You’re a bonder, or at least a potential one.” He nodded, and she continued, “Okay, so souls have memories, and carry memories with them. But they don’t process them, or analyze them, at all - the thinking part of you is separate from your soul. So a soul-touch by itself can transfer images, feelings, perceptions, all that sort of stuff, but not what they mean or how they connect to anything else. Once you get good at it, you can communicate _through_ a soul-touch if you’re prepared for it, but the bond itself will only share memories and perceptions, not thoughts. Then you gotta sort through those and figure out what they mean.”

RC nodded again. “So,” he asked, “you just saw where Jaeris is now?”

“Pretty sure,” Joanna said, slipping the soul blaster back into her holster. “And where he is now is a ginormous ship, with a dude wearing a crazy get-up that matches what I remember the Paladins of Zord wearing.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “And another dude, just a kid, with cyber-implants, I think? I don’t remember there being any cyber-orders, but maybe they’re nearly empty because they’re new instead of old?”

“Tektopians, maybe?” RC suggested. “If there are any Tek Cavaliers out-of-system, they’d make natural allies. Maybe they’ve been recruiting cyborgs?”

“Could be,” Joanna mused. “Anyway, we’ve got an immanent impact up on Mount Freebird; we need to get a crew up there to make sure it doesn’t set fire to the pine woods up there. If we’ve got scavengers up and about, we should probably see if anything from the lowlands wreckage is salvageable, especially from the shield-ship. And someone needs to make breakfast.” She tugged her hat low on her brow and headed for the stairs to the underground.

\---

The stars rolled past the windows of the _Nimue_ ’s bridge like raindrops, falling fast and smearing into streaks as they went. Jaeris was impressed; technically, the _Stratocaster_ was faster, but not by much, and this ship was vastly more massive.

Film Brain looked up from the navigation console. “Travel time to Ultima system under the current hyperspace flux is twelve hours, twenty-two minutes,” he announced.

“Anything interesting in the flux forecast?” Linkara asked, studying a viewscreen instead of the windows.

“There’s supposed to be a general thinning as we head towards galactic East, but not enough to change the travel time predictions,” Film Brain called back. “Looks like there’s nothing big in the long-term forecast, either.”

Jaeris glanced across at Todd. “How do you even get good enough measurements to predict hyperspace flux changes?” he asked. “I’ve always just taken it as it comes and re-adjusted on the fly if there was a surge. I mean, they’re rare enough.”

“Beats the crap out of me,” Todd admitted. “But then, I don’t even pretend to understand how hyperspace works. I barely passed basic astrophysics.”

“It requires a pretty extensive system of detectors,” Linkara agreed. “Zord has a full array, all of the Tektopia systems used to have them, Nostalgia has them, Vidya, a few others.” He looked up, his face suddenly troubled. “I just realized, I have no idea how expensive they are to build or maintain. They must be a rich world thing.”

Todd and Jaeris both nodded. “Seems right to me,” Jaeris added.

Linkara took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I need to remember,” he mumbled, more to himself than to the others, “I don’t have a near-infinite pocketbook when I’m not on Zord. I haven’t been off-planet in way too long, and the other Council members are even worse.”

“I didn’t think we were planning on doing much shopping,” Todd replied.

“Depending on who we end up talking to at Avatar Station,” Jaeris pointed out, “we might have to bribe a few folks.”

Film Brain made a tiny adjustment to one of the controls and looked back. “The Paladins are the wealthiest order, right?” he asked. “I suppose that makes sense; the Emperor was traditionally given at least an honorary initiation into the order, wasn’t he?”

“It wasn’t just honorary, in most cases,” Linkara corrected him. “Emperor Vyce was fully qualified, and so were all but one of his dynastic heirs.” He glanced across at Todd, apprehension stealing across his face.

Todd sighed and took the bait. “Emperor Malachite was supposed to have been one of ours,” he explained, “but there are no records that he ever studied under a Shadow Master, at least not officially; either he studied under a pseudonym, or that must have been a cover story for something else. We never figured out what, though. He was effectively qualified for all of the existing mystic orders at the time, and as far as anyone could tell, he’d had at least unofficial training in all of them, somehow.”

Linkara added, “He was initiated into the Paladins on taking the throne, since it was traditional by then, but he never actually went through our training - and he already knew everything we’d have taught a dedicant, anyway.” He tapped nervously at the arm of the captain’s chair. “But to answer the original question, yes, both the Paladins and the Video Warriors had active support under the Old Empire, both financial and political, that none of the other orders ever enjoyed. The Council has always maintained we’d earned it. Personally, I’ve never been quite so sure about that.”

Jaeris shrugged. “The Gunslingers and the Shadow Knights never wanted to have to report to the official Imperial hierarchy, I know that much,” he stated. “And near as I could figure, same was true for the Aeon Knights and the Tek Cavaliers.” He turned to Film Brain. “Hey, do the Tek Cavaliers still exist? They were on my list of orders to look for, after the Paladins.”

“Remember, my information is going to be out of date,” Film Brain cautioned him, “but as of the last I knew, yes, there were still a few hundred of them. Of course, they’d gone underground, just like the Gunslingers did.”

Todd’s mouth drew into a thoughtful line. “I’m guessing Lord Critic isn’t interested in maintaining that Imperial relationship with the Paladins,” he mused, “which seems a little odd, considering that I’m pretty sure the Video Warriors are loyal to the Nerd Emperor.”

“The Video Warriors are the least mystic of the mystic orders,” Linkara pointed out. “Other than supernatural reflexes, they don’t have much in the way of psi abilities. Heck, you can get tossed _out_ of their order if you manifest soulbonding, telekinesis, shadow-walking, precognition, or timebending. If it’s the psi abilities that our dueling dauphins are afraid of, the Warriors are the best order to ally with.”

Jaeris blinked at him. “Dueling dauphins?” he said, incredulously.

Linkara shrugged and grinned sheepishly. “Hey,” he explained, “I love alliteration.”

Todd ran a hand down his veil, shaking his head.

\---

Pup leapt out of the front seat of the ground transport. “Whoo, yeah, we’ve got the makings of a forest fire here,” he hollered over the engine. “But I think we caught it early. I’m going in with the oxygen suppressant; y’all can cover me.”

“Sure thing,” Joanna agreed, lowering the firefighting exoskeleton rig over the edge of the truck bed. Ev pulled the emergency brake and hopped out of the driver’s seat to help Pup strap the rig on, while Joanna checked to make sure the tanks on the back were fully charged and ready to go.

“Dude, are you sure Lise is going to be okay by herself?” Ev asked as he closed the exo’s chest plate.

“Ain’t much we can do about it either way,” Pup admitted through the rig’s external speakers. “Whatever it was she saw knocked her flat to the floor. She was breathin’ just fine, wasn’t having a seizure, but it took her out cold. Out here, she’d be dead weight, and maybe in danger if the fire picks up.”

“She ain’t by herself, anyway,” Joanna reassured them. “Eliza’s with her. I know she’s barely more than a kid herself, but same goes for you, Ev.”

“Same goes for half the postulates,” Pup agreed. “I mean, RC’s not that much older, is he? And he was running a turret, too.”

Joanna scowled. “Just goes to show you how crappy this war is, that we’re fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with teenagers,” she grumbled as she closed the last valve on the firefighting tanks. “You’re good to go, Pup. Stay clear of anything that looks like we’ll need the hovers to contain.”

“I think we can nip it before it gets that big,” Pup answered as the exo stood up to its full ten feet. He tested the arm servos; they swung naturally as he took a few experimental punches. “Too bad we can’t retrofit these for combat,” he noted.

“The walking pneumatics aren’t built to take laser or blaster bursts, and we can’t shield them and still have full range of motion,” Ev piped up. “I’ve been working on some designs, but we’d have to re-work the motor controls from the ground up.”

Joanna tilted her head to look at the young dedicant. “Are you even trained for exo work?” she asked.

“Shyeah. It’s what I was studying in school before the war broke out,” Ev boasted.

Pup chuckled. “Well, let’s hope you can repair this thing if anything happens, then,” he said; the rig rotated in place, then jogged away towards the rising plume of black smoke.

“You’re mechanically inclined, then?” Joanna asked as she hooked a more conventional water-pump system onto the pulley and winched it out over the edge of the truck.

“You could say that,” Ev answered, turning the base for the pump system so it would land on all four wheels. “At least, I really like putting things together. Then again, I also like blowing things up.” He unhooked the pump system from the winch and held the hook clear until Joanna could reel it back in.

“Then why are you in mobility instead of equipment?” Joanna probed, hooking the winch to the backpack-mounted fire extinguisher. It badly needed a new coat of paint, and the trigger arm had been bent and then hammered back into shape; these things had all been used and abused well beyond their initial tolerances.

“I was, at first,” Ev said quietly. “Then the driver for the equipment convoy I was with got hit by shrapnel from an orbital bombardment. I shoved him into the passenger seat and took the wheel. He - he didn’t make it.”

Joanna sucked in air through her teeth. “Sorry to hear that,” she said. “Was that Errod?”

“I don’t know,” Ev replied. “I didn’t get his name. But after that, I got reassigned to transportation and mobility. I don’t mind; I can fix cars, too.”

Joanna climbed down from the back of the truck, chewing thoughtfully on her lip. “Tell you what,” she said, “why don’t you take the pump off-roader, and I’ll take the backpack extinguisher. Sounds like you’ll have a better chance than me if it breaks down.”

Ev shrugged, but she saw his jaw shift and his shoulders straighten. “Sure, if you say so, Miz Joanna,” he said.

Shrugging into the straps of the backpack, she pointed off to the left of where Pup had gone, towards the still-snowy peak of Mount Freebird. “You sweep upslope and then come back down,” she ordered. “I’ll go downslope and work my way up. If you meet up with Pup before I do, stay with him until you hear from me. If you find the wreck and there’s anything salvageable, hit me up on the comlink radio, and let the base know, too.”

“Sure thing, ma’am,” Eve said, as he started up the engine on the off-roader.

Joanna tightened the straps. These things were awfully heavy. Still, the smoke didn’t look too bad yet; Pup might be able to contain it with the exoskeleton rig alone. She shielded her eyes from the morning sun, then trudged downslope through the underbrush.

\---

“Approaching Ultima system,” announced the _Nimue_ ’s computer.

Linkara had been napping in his chair; he jolted to attention. “Navigation, how soon until we drop out of hyperdrive?”

“In about five -” Film Brain was interrupted by the whole ship shuddering; the raindrop-streaks in the windows turned white and shrank back to stars. “Emergency drop out of hyperdrive,” he announced unnecessarily. Todd touched a pair of controls on the pilot’s dashboard, and the ship’s ion thrusters kicked in.

“Nimue, report!” Linkara shouted at the viewscreen.

“Information: gravitational anomalies detected in Ultima system,” the computer replied. “The ship’s path into Ultima’s gravity well would have taken the ship within the danger range of a detected anomaly.”

“Gravitational anomalies?” Linkara’s voice was skeptical. “What kind of anomalies?”

Film Brain’s eyes went wide. “I’m guessing ones like that,” he said, pointing as the front viewscreen shifted from a visual light scan to a graviton display. A huge graviton source appeared on the screen, just ahead of the _Nimue_ and slightly to solar east; through the windows just above the screen, that section of space looked identical to any other.

Linkara frowned. “What could cause an anomaly of that size?” he demanded.

“Conjecture: a massive space station with a very powerful cloaking device could present a similar profile,” the computer answered.

“Activate radio and broadcast on all frequencies,” Linkara ordered. “This is the Paladin ship _Nimue_ on a diplomatic mission from Zord. Identify yourself.”

The radio emitted only static. After a minute, Linkara glanced upward. “Anything?”

“Information: no signals detected from the anomaly,” the computer stated. “A weak signal is coming from directly behind the anomaly. It appears to be a standard distress beacon.”

Linkara’s eyes narrowed. “A pirate station, with a cloaking device,” he concluded. “No way of knowing whether that’s a lure, or an actual ship they’ve disabled.”

“Doesn’t have to be one or the other,” Jaeris noted.

“True,” Linkara said. “Todd, take us in at 80% of full speed. Jaeris, raise the shields and arm the forward lance. Film Brain, see if you can get a lock on the distress signal.”

“Information: the strength of the gravitational anomaly is fluctuating,” the ship’s computer announced.

“They must have a tractor beam,” Linkara hypothesized. “It can’t be a shield; no one can keep up shields under a cloaking field.”

“Well, you theoretically could,” Todd hedged, “but the power drain would be exponentially bigger than either one alone.”

Jaeris shifted nervously. “Aren’t weapons with huge power needs why we’re here in the first place? Are we sure that’s not a thing?”

Linkara shook his head. “They’ll have to drop one or the other,” he stated, “and if they don’t, we’ll ram the shield - that’ll force them to drop the cloak.”

“Are you serious?” Todd yelped. “You’re going to ram an invisible station? What if you cause a hull breach?”

Linkara smiled with his mouth but not his eyes; the effect was unsettling. “Then they should have answered when a Paladin hailed them. 80% speed, now!”

Todd bit his lip, but the ship accelerated as ordered. Jaeris pondered whether he was willing to risk innocent lives, but that could wait until Linkara actually gave the order; he brought up the shields and set the forward lance charging.

Film Brain glanced back at Linkara. “Strength of the graviton flux is still increasing,” he announced. “Linkara, with all due respect, I think your computer’s wrong; it’d take something at least the mass of a moon to produce this gravity well, not just a station.”

The starfield in front of the ship seemed to warp and bend like a soap film forming a bubble. Suddenly, the stars in a small disc of space disappeared, and the ones around them were squashed into threads instead of pinpoints. An alarm blared, flashing red and green lights across the bridge. “Warning: the ship is approaching an event horizon,” the computer announced.

“A _what_?” Linkara yelped. “How did that get there?”

“The cloaking field wasn’t hiding a station,” Film Brain shouted over the klaxon. “It was hiding a pseudostable black hole! And it’s picked up a spin - it’s not going to stay pseudostable for very long with something the mass of this ship approaching!”

“Full reverse!” Linkara called out.

“With all respect,” Todd shouted back, “if I just reverse, the black hole’s strong enough to overpower the thrusters. We’d need to engage hyperdrive to escape the gravity well!”

“And that’d tear the ship apart, between the black hole and the gravity from Ultima itself,” Linkara realized aloud. “Can we plot an arc that will take us around it without skimming the event horizon?”

“Information: the probability of a lateral escape is less than 0.1% under the current spin conditions,” the computer said. “The ship is too close to the gravity well to escape without a boost from another gravity source.”

Todd gripped his hood with both hands. “We can’t all fit in the _Kali_ either,” he groaned.

Linkara looked offended. “If the _Nimue_ isn’t strong enough to escape, your little sliver of deep space can’t be, either,” he argued.

“Not in normal space,” Todd agreed, “but a black hole’s event horizon doesn’t extend into shadow-space.”

Jaeris felt an idea hit him right on his third eye. “Todd,” he called, “how do you take a ship into shadow, anyway?”

“How is that relevant -” Linkara started, but Jaeris held up a hand and shushed him.

“It’s an intuition thing. I have to be aware of the boundaries of the whole ship,” Todd shouted back over the blaring alarm. “That’s why it can only be done with a ship as small as a shadescout.”

Jaeris turned back to Film Brain. “How good is your neural interface with the ship?” he asked.

“I couldn’t ask for better,” Film Brain replied, although he looked apprehensive.

Jaeris turned to Linkara. “Are you a soulbonder?” he asked.

“Yes, although not a particularly good one,” Linkara answered. “You can’t possibly be thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“Do we have a better option?” Jaeris hollered back. “I don’t much like the idea of hitting that event horizon - even if we survive it, we’ll never get out!”

“Point to the Gunslinger,” Todd said, climbing out of the pilot’s seat. “I don’t know if this is going to work - I’ve never tried to take anything bigger than the _Kali_ into shadow with me - but I’m willing to give it a shot!”

Film Brain glanced at Linkara. “Permission to become one with your ship, sir?”

Linkara looked up at the ceiling. “You’ll have to ask her,” he said helplessly.

“Information: under the current circumstances, I am willing,” replied the computer.

That struck Jaeris as extremely strange, but he’d worry about that later. He jumped from the weapons console and jogged over to navigation.

Todd sank cross-legged to the floor next to Film Brain’s chair and tilted his head back. Film Brain himself had closed his eyes and looked all but comatose, limp in his seat, with only a faint fluttering of the eyelids to show he was still alive. 

Jaeris planted one hand on Film Brain’s forehead and the other on Todd’s neck. “Ready?” he asked Linkara.

“I guess,” Linkara answered, taking one of Film Brain’s slack wrists in one hand and setting his other hand on top of Jaeris’s. “Lead the way, Gunslinger.”

Jaeris was playing chords in his head before he even closed his eyes. As he slipped down, he was joined by Todd noodling out a bass line. Linkara slipped in over them, singing wordlessly, and they rode the melody down into Film Brain’s consciousness -

\- into the immensity of the ship, millions of data connections and tons of metal and ceramic that Film Brain wore as easily as he wore his own body - 

\- a body cutting through the vacuum of space in a cocoon of grav shields, holding seven minds as one, towards a maw of a gravity well at once immense and compact against the expanse of interplanetary space -

\- interplanetary space that was only one unfolding of the multiverse, and at the lip of that great maw it was nothing at all to curl the edge of space under and slip into a different unfolding, where there was neither starlight nor the black hole’s infinite darkness, only shadow -

\- shadow thick enough to swallow the sound of the ship’s engines in swaths of shade, sailing on through silence, as seven-minds-in-one-mind held the fold of space against the ship’s own mass, was it long enough, it had to be -

\- space uncurled to its usual length and breadth -

And they were back. Jaeris toppled backwards and found himself on the floor again, looking up. Linkara was sitting on the floor next to him, their hands still interlocked. Todd was on his hands and knees, gasping as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Film Brain still looked asleep.

“Did we make it?” Todd wheezed.

“Information: the ship is now past the edge of the event horizon,” the computer - no, Jaeris realized, the _Nimue_ herself - announced. “We have passed through several hundred kilometers of intervening space. Navigation is recalculating.”

“Your whole ship is an AI!” Jaeris blurted. “A strong AI, with a soul and everything, not one of the weak ones like the ones that run your defense grid!”

“Are those even legal?” Todd rasped. “I mean, they’d be legal on Nostalgia, since you can own a cyborg there, but on Zord?”

“Please don’t tell anyone!” Linkara pleaded. “I didn’t - it wasn’t intentional, it just happened!”

Jaeris untangled his hand from Linkara’s and sat up. “And - there were seven of us. You, me, Todd, Film Brain, the ship -”

“You may call me Nimue,” the ship added.

“Sorry, ma’am, Nimue, and -” Jaeris pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, untangling the mess of soul impressions. “The soul in your soul blaster,” he realized.

Linkara grinned mirthlessly, nodded, and pressed a finger to his lips.

“And one more,” Jaeris whispered.

“Pollo,” Linkara sighed. “He was supposed to be a maintenance robot for the whole ship, but the same thing happened that happened with Nimue. Actually, Pollo was first; Nimue was later.”

Todd pushed himself to his feet. “Why are you freaking out about it?” he asked. “You could have just told us. It’s not like we can enforce your laws.”

Linkara struggled upright and looked Todd in the face. “Because Paladins are forbidden to have children,” he said flatly. “Aren’t you?”

“Actually, no,” Todd answered. “Shadow Knights are celibate, but we’re not required to be chaste, and if we do conceive a child out of wedlock, we’re expected to be present in their life. It’s not exactly smiled upon, but it happens.”

Jaeris snorted and levered himself to standing using the end of the console. “I’m married,” he noted. “Joanna isn’t ready for kids yet, but we fully intend to have them someday, when this war is over.”

Linkara pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “I didn’t even think about that,” he admitted. “So it’s really just us?”

“Would AIs really count as children?” Todd asked. “I mean, you don’t exactly have to change any diapers.”

“No, but I still had to teach them how to communicate, about ethics, about everything else,” Linkara argued. “I’m responsible for them.”

Jaeris clapped his hands over his mouth. The AIs were amazing enough, but Linkara’s soul blaster had a whole soul in it, not just a piece of one. That was unheard of, except for one soul blaster that was a thing of legend. Surely the youngest member of the Paladin Council wouldn’t have it?

Linkara looked at him, worry crinkling his eyes. Jaeris opened his mouth to ask, then thought better of it.

Film Brain’s voice blared from the speakers. “Captain Linkara, there’s a ship in what to us would have been the gravitational shadow of the cloaked black hole. It’s the source of the distress beacon signal, and it’s not responding to a generic request to open communication. It’s within radio range. Permission to use the ship’s wireless communications to snoop around a little?”

Linkara glanced at Film Brain’s comatose body, then nodded. “Be careful, Film Brain. I want you back in one piece. Permission granted.”

\---

“I’ll be right back,” Film Brain told her.

“This unit knows,” Nimue said. She seemed to be incapable of referring to herself in the first person, despite clearly having healthy ego boundaries; after all, they were more or less sharing a body at the moment, and she clearly understood where she ended and he started. “Main transmission antenna is at highest possible gain. Be careful.”

“I will be,” he assured her, and he leaped across interplanetary space.

Not that long ago, he wouldn’t have guessed he could do this. His world had been the unending grunt labor of keeping the hydroponics core of a free station running, and maybe growing a few flowers just for their aesthetic value. But now, he’d been in the heads of a soulbonder and a shadow-walker; he had a new liege-lord and a legal existence of his own. The world was so much bigger than it had been ever since he’d been borged. 

Maybe it was even bigger than it had been before, when Lord Critic was his entire world. He didn’t love Sir Linkara the same way, at least not yet, but maybe that was a good thing. Maybe he needed his world to be open for a while.

He rode the radio transmission, a simple hailing request, into the antennae of the other ship, and then he was in, skating through its data channels. It wasn’t a large ship, perhaps ten times the size of the _Stratocaster_ and small enough for Nimue to swallow it whole. 

He started at the drive systems. It had a standard hyperdrive, not terribly fast, but phenomenally good ion boosters; in normal space, it was at least as fast as General Snob’s ship, perhaps as fast as the _Stratocaster_ , and ferociously maneuverable - it would be able to dance around either fighter craft.

He slid down the optic cables to the weapons systems. Again, it didn’t have a ton of weapons, but the ones it had were of excellent quality; two standard Gauss cannons with double the usual complement of ammunition, four mid-range ion blasters that could borrow the ion channels from the propulsion system for a bit of extra oomph at the expense of acceleration, and a single high-powered green laser that would be useless against a ship with working shields, but could easily slice and dice one without them.

The Gauss cannons were powered up; the ion blasters and the laser were not. He tweaked their code so that activating them would cause a feedback loop between targeting and power; they should be impossible to aim without losing charge. Messing with the Gauss cannons would alert whoever was at the weapons console that something was up, so he skipped that.

On to shields. These were standard-issue grav shields, using the same systems that produced the artificial gravity within the ship, and were neither particularly impressive nor particularly vulnerable. They were currently powered up, which was no surprise. He looked at the code to see if he could rig a deadfall trap to bring them down if necessary.

Something grabbed at his consciousness and ripped him out of the shield system into general memory. It seemed to have a hold on him from multiple directions at once, as if he were being pinned in place by a mass of vines. He twisted away from it and dove back towards the drive systems, panicked and flailing.

It followed him. _GET OUT OF MY SHIP_ , it roared into the datastream. He’d seen intrusion countermeasures before, but this one was huge; he’d never seen one with a codebase so large he couldn’t even read it! He prepared to kick off of the drive systems into ship’s sensors; hopefully, the ICE wouldn’t anticipate a lateral move.

Nope. It was still hot on his tail, and slithering bits of it blocked off every route out of the sensor array. He was pinned; there was nowhere left to run but out of the ship completely. He tensed his presence, hunting for any antenna he could use to escape, and found none that could process his own information without potential losses.

He froze. It didn’t make sense to talk about what the ICE looked like; it was code, like he was at the moment. But it seemed to have a shape, a large, rounded mass surrounded by tendrils of different thicknesses, with a pair of huge, glinting eyes that bore down on him, perceiving without sight.

 _OH, HELL, IT’S YOU,_ it said, and suddenly he was flung free of the ship, sailing back towards Nimue on the crest of a radio transmission. He barely had time to aim for the main sensor antenna.

He landed back in his own body with a start, as the radio crackled to life. “Unknown Paladin warship, this the the Syren ship _Loose Cannon_ ,” it said in a distinctly feminine voice. “We invite you to parlay.”

\---

“Paladins do not parlay,” Linkara growled into the radio as Jaeris ran to Film Brain’s side.

“Are you okay?” Jaeris whispered as Film Brain’s hands opened and closed on thin air.

“I will be in a moment,” Film Brain whispered back. “I got into their ship’s systems, but they had better countermeasures than any I’ve seen before. I got tossed right back out.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Todd burst out, “Enchick, what the Hell is this bullshit? And when did you move to Ultima from Cucurbita system?”

Linkara stared at Todd, mouth agape, as his words hung in the air. The radio crackled with static, then said, “Todd? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” Todd shouted back. “What are you doing in Ultima system, and why do you have a black hole?”

“Why do you have a Paladin warship?” the radio shot back.

“He doesn’t,” Linkara broke in. “I do. This is Captain Linkara, Master of the Arsenal of the Holy Noble Order of Paladins of Zord, and this is my ship, the _Nimue_. Am I to understand that I am speaking to Lady Critic of Nostalgia system?”

“Well,” the voice said, “I’d prefer to think of you as speaking to the notorious Syren captain, the Phantom of the Trade Routes, but technically, yes, that’s correct.”

“Pirates,” Film Brain said softly. “That was what was unusual about Ultima. But I don’t remember anything about a cloaked black hole.”

“Yeah, that’s new-ish,” Lady Critic answered. “Clearly we have some bugs to work out. We’ve never used it on anything even half your mass, or your engine thrust, before; the goal is to catch a ship in an inescapable orbit with it, not trap them inside the event horizon. There’s no booty in that.”

Another voice in the background muttered, “Also, sane ship captains tend not to try to ram it.”

A third voice, higher and melodic, added, “Now, now. When has a Paladin failed to meet a problem head-on?”

Linkara looked simultaneously embarrassed and annoyed, but all he said was, “I thought it was a station with a tractor beam and a cloak.”

“We have the tractor beam over here,” Lady Critic explained. “Once our clients have paid up, we use it to drag them out of their orbits around it and send them on their way.”

“How do you keep them from just shooting you once they’re free and taking their money back?” Jaeris asked.

The second voice laughed; now that she was closer to the microphone, there was a metallic rasp to her voice. “I disable their weapons,” she said, “just like you sent the little one over to take out ours.”

“I’m as fond of an air of mystery as anyone, possibly more than most,” noted the third voice, “but perhaps we should turn the screen on so we can all see who we’re dealing with.”

“We’re already broadcasting visuals,” Linkara announced. “So, ready when you are.”

The front viewscreen split; the left side still displayed the gravitational map. The right side resolved into three - well, Jaeris figured they were all women, but they were a strange sight to behold indeed.

The one in the center, and the only one seated, was a short woman with an air of aristocracy, her hair tied up in two elaborately ribboned top-knots. She wore a detached ascot fluffed into an extravagant but slightly off-center bow, vaguely similar to the rich but disheveled cravat Lord Critic often sported in his propaganda broadcasts. There was also something similar about their posture and coloring; they had the same piercing blue eyes, Jaeris realized. Other than that, their features were completely different; he might have guessed that they were cousins, but not brother and sister.

Behind her left shoulder was a tall, willowy woman, pale as moonlight with long, fine white-gold hair. She wore a floor-length black dress decorated with onyx beads in a spiderweb motif, heavy eye makeup, and dark red lipstick, and she was eyeing them (more accurately, the screen on the other ship, but the camera was apparently well-placed) with a combination of suspicion and distaste.

Behind Lady Critic’s right shoulder was a writhing nightmare in stainless steel. The top half had clearly been human once, a woman of substantial height and heft, but her fingernails were now a multi-tool assortment of dataports and connection hubs. Below the waist, she was a mass of tentacles, fully articulated and burnished in chrome; he thought he counted ten, but they were in constant motion, so he couldn’t be sure. Her hair had been replaced with a medusa’s-nest of smaller metal tendrils, swaying like snakes. Her eyes were featureless and glowed an eerie green. Unlike the other two, she was smiling, but it didn’t look particularly friendly.

“Introductions all around would probably be our best option,” Lady Critic said. “And I believe our Shadow Knight is the only one acquainted with everyone involved.”

“Okay, fine,” Todd huffed. “Ladies, this is Sir Linkara of Zord, member of the Paladin High Council; Jaeris of Mellotron, of the Honorable Order of Gunslingers; and Film Brain, late of Nostalgia but now a citizen of Zord. Gentlemen, may I present Lady Enchick Critic of Nostalgia; Lady Maven of Eventide, postulate of the Ancient Order of Revenants and Syren of Dark Pa’au; and Nella Omega, late of Nostalgia.”

Lady Critic squinted at the screen. “Buck?” she asked. “Is that you?”

“Not anymore,” Film Brain said nervously; his eyes darted away from the screen. “Please - my name is Film Brain now; it’s how I registered when Sir Linkara gave me a citizenship again.”

“May I ask what happened?” she said, a hint of worry in her voice.

Nella’s head swung in an exaggerated gesture clearly meant to replace an eye-roll she was no longer equipped for. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said, in a voice with a distinct electronic echo.

“Only in the broad outline,” Lady Critic answered. “Seriously, Bu- I mean, Film Brain, I didn’t hear about this. Why the name change?”

Film Brain wrapped his arms around himself and shrank into a ball in the navigator’s chair. “He killed me and had me borged,” he whimpered. “I didn’t - I’d hoped no one I knew before would see me like this.”

Lady Critic’s hand curled into a claw on the arm of her captain’s chair. Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, drawing herself to her full height; it wasn’t much, but somehow her features rearranged from those of an effete noblewoman playing at being a pirate captain to those of an heir to the Imperial throne. “He did _what_?” she growled.

“Hey,” Linkara interrupted, “go easy on him - it’s not an easy topic for him.”

Her features somehow hardened even further; her eyes glinted like jewels. “Buck Mathews of Nostalgia,” she commanded, extending a finger at the camera, “I order to you explain your current state. Start from the beginning. Leave out no detail.”

Film Brain burst into tears, sobbing raggedly with his hands pressed tight to his face.

“He’s not yours anymore!” Linkara shouted, drawing himself out of his own captain’s chair and sweeping his cape back.

“I was working as the liason for General Phelous by then,” Film Brain gasped out between sobs. “He, General Phelous I mean, was complaining about the, the waste of manpower and fighters - the factories on Tektopia Prime were only just coming online, and the general was still having to fight off raids from the Tek Cavaliers, and our stocks of titanium and iridium and just people to recruit were running low, and the general was sick to death of fighting on two fronts at once.” He paused to blow his nose. “I asked - I tried to be polite about it, but I asked why Lord Critic had decided to stretch his forces and supply lines so thin, knowing that the Nerd Emperor had the, the meteor cannon online now.” Film Brain fell silent, shuddering.

Lady Critic looked like a regal statue, like something carved of marble, save for two spots of red rising in her cheeks. “Continue,” she ordered.

“He - he accused me of undermining his command,” Film Brain wailed; tears poured down both cheeks. “He flew into a rage, he, he called me a traitor and a Tektopian sympathizer, he - he _slapped_ me, then he punched me. I - must have fallen, I was on the floor, then he - the gun he carries everywhere, the slug-thrower - he shot me, four times in the chest.” He swallowed and opened his eyes, blinking, staring at a memory. One hand wandered to just above where his heart should have been. “I could feel each one hit me,” he continued. “The last one must have gotten me in the spine, because I went numb. He walked away, left me on the floor to bleed out. When I woke up, most of me was metal - most of my head is still organic, and the skin, but not much else.” He plucked idly at the cable running from his left temple to the console. “I saw him once more after that. He told me that, because I was so concerned about mineral resources, he’d made me into something he could trade. He sold me off to Stationmaster Zero at Palladium for a load of heavy radioactives. I was there for a little over two years.”

Lady Maven and Nella Omega shared a glance. “What an asshole,” Nella spat, and Lady Maven nodded.

Film Brain was regaining his composure; at least, he’d stopped sobbing. “So, in short, Lord Critic killed me and had my corpse converted into a Type Rho cyborg as a commodity,” he said bitterly, “just because I asked a question.”

Lady Critic looked away from the screen, scowling.

Nella cocked her head. “You’re not a Rho,” she said, her voice rising as if she were asking a question.

“Yes, I am,” Film Brain replied, his eyebrows knitting together. “That’s what the manufacturer’s mark says.” He tugged up the hem of his shirt and pointed to a small black box tattooed just below his navel.

Jaeris leaned over to look at it. The top row of text in the box was a series of four-sided glyphs he couldn’t make heads or tails of, but the second row read, “P 19000 Nost IS”. He guessed that the first mark was a Rho rather than a letter P.

“Don’t pay any attention to that,” Nella said. “For us, it’s always a lie; mine claims I’m a Type Sigma. I saw what you can do. A Rho wouldn’t have been able to even read our system from the outside, no matter how good your ship’s transmitters are.” She shook her head, and her hair-tendrils curled into ringlets. “You’re an Omega, like me.”

“But why would Critic have sold off an Omega?” Lady Maven wondered. “It must have cost millions of credits - there’s no way a single load of radioactive elements could come anywhere close to making it up.”

“I can’t be a Type Omega,” Film Brain protested. “Look at me! I can still pass for human if I wear long sleeves and I’m careful.”

“What’s a Type Omega?” Jaeris asked. “I mean, we don’t have many cyborgs on Mellotron at all, so I’m not exactly up on all the differences.”

Nella moved closer to the camera, her glittering appendages shimmying and slithering as she did so. She spread her still-mostly-organic-looking arms and opened her very-not-organic eyes wide. “An Omega,” she said with a hint of pride in her voice, “is a perfect fusion of an organic mind and will with artificial speed, power, and finesse. We can hack into almost any system effortlessly, defeat all but the most sophisticated AIs - I’m intensely curious about yours, by the way; I saw how complex it was and didn’t even try it - repair and improve almost any sort of equipment we can find a schematic for, even modify our own hardware.” She ran a hand through her chrome-plated hair. “I’ve made several improvements to myself over the years,” she stated. “And even with those modifications, he kept a step ahead of me for several seconds. That’s an eternity in processor time.”

“It didn’t seem that long to me,” Film Brain said, his voice wavering.

“Not to the human part; it never does,” Nella answered. “But it was impressive all the same, especially if you didn’t know you were an Omega.”

“I didn’t know you were, back then, either,” Film Brain replied. “I mean, I knew you were a cyborg, but -”

“At the time, we had her in stealth mode,” Lady Critic interrupted. “I didn’t particularly want my brother knowing I had an Omega, precisely because I was worried he’d want one, too. And I’d guessed that he wouldn’t wait for an unfortunate accident to have one made, although I never imagined he’d use one of his discarded boy-toys for it. I figured he’d pick a random soldier.” Her mouth closed into a hard line.

“Or wait until one of his generals disobeyed an order, just to make an example of him,” Lady Maven suggested.

“That would be just as bad, honestly. My point is, he’s clearly gone too far,” Lady Critic argued. “I don’t care _what_ Buck said; there’s no excuse for him _shooting_ someone who was devoted to him heart and soul like that, much less selling him into cyborg slavery.” She paused. “Although even with his poor decision-making skills, spending the credits to have him made into a Type Omega and then selling him as a Rho does seem peculiar.”

“Selling an unregistered Omega is technically illegal,” Lady Maven noted, “but yes, it does clash horribly with his stated rationale.”

“And when has something being illegal ever stopped him?” Nella added.

Film Brain blinked back the last traces of tears and frowned at the screen. “How do you know I’m unregistered?” he asked. “Maybe Stationmaster Zero knew and never told me.”

“Oh, please,” Nella laughed, “there are only three registered Omegas in this arm of the galaxy, and you’d better believe I know where they are at all times.” She ticked the names off on her fingers. “Scifi Omega runs the Repository on Beta Eohippus, and he hasn’t been off-planet in two years. Sage Omega is on Abaddon Station; actually, at this point, it might be more accurate to say he _is_ Abaddon Station. And Allegria Omega is currently cleaning up a huge security mess on one of the defense platforms at Nostalgia, and what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on that wall.” She grinned, showing just a few too many teeth for comfort. “We unregistereds outnumber them by about a dozen to one. If you’d been registered when you were borged, I’d’ve known about you.”

Film Brain shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he whined. “I feel like I’ve had my entire sense of who I am taken away twice, now.”

Linkara all but stomped over to him. “You’re still a citizen of Zord,” he announced, glaring at the screen and swirling his cape dramatically. “You’re exactly who you were when I met you -”

“Less than two days ago,” Todd noted under his breath.

“- And there’s no one I’d rather have working for me,” Linkara finished, tilting his head back and jutting his chin at the screen.

Lady Critic glanced back at Nella, then pursed her lips. “I apologize for the error in decorum,” she said, sounding more sad than apologetic. “I’m used to thinking of Buck as one of my citizens, but you’re absolutely correct that he’s a different legal entity now. I overstepped my authority.”

Lady Maven’s eyes widened, but she said nothing. Todd seemed similarly surprised, if his body language was anything to go by.

Linkara exhaled loudly. “Thank you, Your Highness,” he said, and his voice betrayed a shakiness he’d been successfully hiding.

“Having said that,” Lady Critic continued, “it seems clear that my brother has done far worse in his quest to unify this galactic arm.” She rubbed at her temples before refocusing on Jaeris’s side of the screen. “Gunslinger Jaeris of Mellotron, may I ask why you are here?”

“Um,” Jaeris said, turning to stare at Todd.

Todd shook his head. “Tell her the truth,” he advised. “Lying will just make her mad in the end, whether it fools her for right now or not.”

Jaeris cleared his throat. “Lord Critic has destroyed several cities and vast swaths of farmland, forest, and wilderness in his attempts to subjugate my homeworld,” he explained, managing somehow not to stammer. “I’m, um, me and my wife are sort of the leaders of the last gasp of the resistance against him. Ma’am.”

Lady Critic nodded solemnly. “I am aware of my brother’s current military adventures, or misadventures, as they may be. For what it’s worth, I was firmly against his plans to conquer both the Tektopian worlds and the Inward Rim by force, but other than an initial attempt to have the Nostalgian noble houses withdraw their monetary support - which failed, albeit narrowly - I did not work overmuch to oppose his efforts,” she explained. She didn’t sound sad, exactly, but there was a note of melancholy under her words.

“Ah, I see, ma’am.” Well, that made Jaeris feel a little bolder; he was at least not speaking directly with the enemy. “Some members of my order have precognitive abilities, but they’re not very predictable. One of our best had a vision and told us that if the three nearly-empty orders could be united and brought back to Mellotron, we could - well, at least survive, maybe even beat him. So that’s what I’m trying to do, ma’am.”

Lady Critic turned and murmured something to Lady Maven, who glanced up at the ceiling for a long moment before shaking her head and murmuring back. Lady Critic seemed to think that over for another minute, then addressed the screen again: “There aren’t any of those orders in Ultima system, and if you have a Shadow Knight, a Gunslinger, and a Paladin on board, you’ve probably already met your goal. Why are you and this warship here?”

“You know what’ll happen if we beat Lord Critic and stop there,” Todd said flatly. “We don’t want to kill him, and we don’t want the Nerd Emperor finishing what he started.”

“Are you looking for another heir to the Imperial Throne?” Lady Maven asked.

Jaeris looked startled; he hadn’t thought that far forward. Linkara clearly had, though; he answered, “We’ll need to find one eventually, but in the meantime, we’re trying to find out anything we can about both their super-weapons - Lord Critic’s disintegrator beams and the Nerd Emperor’s asteroid cannon. We were hoping Avatar Station might have some useful informants.”

Lady Critic chewed her lower lip and pressed a button on the arm of her chair. A blinking amber light appeared and the screen went silent, as the three noblewomen turned away from the camera and proceeded to have what appeared to be a rather tense discussion.

“Should I try to listen in?” Film Brain asked tentatively.

Linkara shook his head, and Jaeris agreed. “Give them a minute,” Linkara said. “Seeing you borged seems to have shocked Lady Critic more than all the news reports of the mess at Tektopia and the massacres at Mellotron have.”

Jaeris turned towards Todd. “Is there a rule that we can’t have an Empress?” he asked. “I mean, if I were her, and my brother was the heir to the imperial throne and a complete idiot, I think I’d be spending my time trying to challenge his claim, not farting around being a small-time pirate captain.”

“It’s not clear whether the admittedly archaic parts of the legal code directing the imperial succession permit an Empress at all,” Linkara answered for Todd, “and even if it’s technically possible, her claim would fall behind all possible male claimants to the throne.”

“She and I have had that conversation a million times,” Todd grumbled. “I’m pretty sure most Nostalgians, or at least the nobles, would prefer having her as the Empress, but yeah - basically, about thirty other dudes would have to either die or relinquish their claims for her to have a shot.” He drummed his fingers on the side of the pilot’s console. “Having said that,” he continued, “she could pretty much bump any of those dudes’ claims to the top of the stack by marrying them.”

The thought made Jaeris’s mouth pucker. “Isn’t she related to most of them?” he asked. “By definition?”

“Yeah,” Todd conceded, “but not all that closely. She and the Nerd Emperor are third cousins once removed.”

“Still kind of creepy,” Jaeris mumbled.

Linkara shrugged. “I think that’s a matter of what you’re used to,” he suggested. “I mean, I’m not Nostalgian; I was born on the Ring at Futon II, and the population there isn’t all that big compared to a planet, so maybe the rules are different. But third cousins doesn’t strike me as icky. First cousins would, of course.”

“On Nostagia among the upper class, first cousins are legally permitted to marry,” Film Brain added. “Same for Vidya. It’s not encouraged, but it happens, especially when one branch of a family needs to inherit another branch’s titles.”

Jaeris could feel himself paling. “That’s pretty icky, all right.”

Todd scowled at the three of them. “Anyway,” he said, “like I was saying, it’s not like God-Emperor Malachite had any direct descendants of his own, and he had several branches of the imperial lineage forcibly pruned. All of the current potential heirs are descended from the Golden Emperor via Angry Emperor Joe’s youngest brother, so the common ancestor in the broadest cases is -” he ticked off on his fingers “- nine generations or so back. Maybe ten, depending on the branch of descent.”

“Which is why most of them have equally clear, or unclear really, claims to the throne,” Film Brain added. “And why effectively adding Lady Critic’s claim to theirs would seriously make them a front-runner. I’m honestly not sure why the Nerd Emperor never tried to court her.”

“Because she’d have sent him packing back to Vidya with his ass in his hands,” Todd snorted. “She thinks he’s as big an idiot as her brother. Like I said, we had this conversation - it’s, um, it’s one of the reasons we broke up. I’m only not a commoner on a technicality; the House of Critic would never have let us be a permanent thing, even if my order would have let me marry her, which it wouldn’t have, and if we’d been ready to get married, which we absolutely weren’t. And she doesn’t want to get hitched to someone just to give them the crown, you know?”

Film Brain raised an eyebrow. “I thought it was because you two determined you couldn’t actually live together,” he said, smirking slightly. “As in, she cluttered up the bathroom with cosmetics and you left the kitchen sponge in the sink.”

“That, too,” Todd agreed. “Although we probably could have gotten around that by hiring a maid; it’s not like it’d be a financial hardship for her.”

The radio crackled back to life. “Sir Todd of the Shadow Knights,” Lady Maven announced, “we need to speak with you.”

“Privately or publicly?” Todd asked. “I’m really tired of sneaking around.”

“The others may listen if they choose,” Lady Maven replied. “Who fetched you from Twilight?”

“Jaeris did,” Todd answered, “although Film Brain told him where to find me.”

Lady Maven nodded slowly. “Is it still there?” she asked, is a much lower voice.

“Absolutely,” Todd said, straightening up slightly.

“And this quest,” she went on, gesturing at the rest of the bridge, “was worth leaving it unguarded for?”

Todd leaned on the pilot’s console and let out a slow breath. “If I hadn’t been there alone for as long as I had, and if I thought there were anyone else left who could get a salvage ship where it could find it, I might not have thought so,” he said slowly, “but - yeah.” He reached behind him, into the folds of his cloak, and drew out the keytar. “I brought mine with me,” he continued. “The rest are - well, they’re still safe, that’s all I’ll say on an unsecured channel.”

Lady Maven looked thoughtful and switched the sound off again.

Linkara blinked at him. “What was that all about?” he demanded.

Todd flipped a switch on the end of the keytar and played an E minor chord. The diffuse shadows in the corners of the room gathered themselves into a vaguely bipedal shape in front of Linkara; as Todd improvised a melody over the chord, it solidified into a dark reflection of the Paladin with glinting red eyes.

“Okay,” Linkara said, his hand inching towards his soulblaster, “you can stop that whenever you like.”

Todd took his fingers off the keys and watched the shadow-illusion dissipate. “Huh,” he noted, “usually it just makes generic monsters.”

Linkara scowled at the last remnants of the shape. “So what was that?” he asked. “Some sort of sonic projector?”

“Sort of,” Todd agreed. “It’s the Keytar of Dark Pa’au, one of his five Great Instruments. Emperor Malachite had him hunted down in the asteroids of Twilight System, but when his engines were hit, rather than accept capture, he made his Syrens take the escape pod and then took the entire ship into shadow.” He paused, as if he were considering his next words carefully. “Lady Maven was one of the original Syrens. She and I went searching for Dark Pa’au’s ship more than once, and found it exactly once. Since she can’t shadow-walk and I don’t know the passcodes, neither of us can get in alone, and finding it at all is like searching for a single pebble in a river, even if you can shadow-walk and have a ship you can do it in.”

Jaeris knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t stop himself from blurting, “She doesn’t look anywhere near that old!”

“She was an acolyte for the Ancient Order of Revenants before she became a Syren,” Todd explained. “She joined up with Dark Pa’au before she finished her training, but she learned enough of their secrets to slow her aging way down, maybe even stop it, I’m not sure. Anyway, I have the Keytar of Illusions, and she has the Flute of Enchantment; the rest of the Great Instruments are still on the ship. We swore that we wouldn’t go back for them until the imperial question was settled.” His hands fluttered against the keys, not quite pressing them. “Whether it was to turn the Great Instruments over to a museum or to arm a resistance with them would depend on the Emperor, but we didn’t want them floating around in normal space while the conflict was still happening.”

Linkara scratched his head. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” he argued. “Wouldn’t you want them where you could get them before the wrong man took the throne?”

“Not if another wrong man could get them when we fell,” Todd said vaguely. 

“I wouldn’t want them where Lord Critic could get at them,” Film Brain added, “and I think I would have felt that way even when I was catering to his every whim.”

The radio buzzed again. “We have reached a decision,” Lady Critic’s voice announced.

“Before you tell us,” Todd broke in, “how’s Kali?”

“She’s doing fine, for a dog her age,” Lady Critic replied; her voice betrayed more affection than she’d displayed for the entire conversation, although the only sign of it on her face was a gentle crinkle at the corners of her eyes. “Not as energetic as she used to be, but just as cuddly as ever.” She returned to her previous stern countenance. “We have decided to help you find the information you seek. However, this will require that one of us accompany you to Avatar Station to speak with the Master of the Station, and we cannot leave the black hole unattended, even if we don’t re-cloak it yet. Sir Linkara of Zord, I request, as is my right as a member of the galactic royal family, that you transport me to Avatar Station and back.”

“It would be my honor, Your Highness,” Linkara replied, bowing nearly to the floor and just barely catching his hat before it slipped off. “Shall I beam you over, or would you prefer to transport from your ship?”

“If our respective Omegas can arrange the appropriate shield maneuvers,” Lady Critic said, “I suspect your teleporters have a greater range than mine.”

“By which she means we don’t actually have any,” Nella Omega said, grinning. “Film Brain, do you have a lock yet?”

“Just a second,” Film Brain replied. “Yes, I’ve got it. Are you ready for transport?”

“Actually,” Lady Critic said, getting to her feet significantly less regally than before, “let me go pack an overnight bag first.”

Nella Omega rolled her head again. “This may take a while,” she grumbled.

\---

Joanna pushed a few stray strands of dark hair out of her eyes, along with a trickle of sweat. The good news had been that none of the fires left by the crashed fighter were very large, even the one by the wreck itself. The bad news was that there were several of them, spread over an area three or four miles long by half a mile wide; one of its fuel pods must have been leaking before it hit. Worse, the fire-area-by-way-of-debris-field was entirely made of some of the rockiest, least even terrain on the entire mountain below the tree line; while the rocky outcroppings and occasional short cliffs were serving as effective fire-breaks, they were also making it very difficult to get from one fire to the next.

The comlink radio at her side beeped. She hit the still-smoldering brush in front of her with another wet blast from the backpack pump and then glanced down at it. Some fool had sent her a text message instead of just activating the radio.

It read, _Ms Joanna i found something plz come see Ev_.

“I can’t come see if you don’t tell me where you are,” she grumbled, thumbing the button on the radio. “Ev, come in, do you read?” The proximity alerts didn’t seem to be working very well, either; both Ev’s and Pup’s were flickering amber.

“I can hear you loud and clear,” Pup’s voice responded, “but I think something’s wrong with the kid’s handset - I can only hear about every third word, and you’re even farther away. Miz Jo, the fire by the main body of the wreck is out, and my tanks are running way low; I’m going back to the truck for a refill.”

“Sounds good,” she replied. “Anything salvageable?”

“One fuel tank didn’t rupture,” Pup replied, “although I can’t tell whether it’s got anything in it or not. There’s lots of usable scrap metal. Not much in the way of salvageable electronics, though - the cabin was on fire when I got here.”

Joanna clucked her tongue. “Let’s hope the poor bastard was either dead or out cold before that happened,” she murmured. She hooked the radio back on her belt and headed upslope; most of the tendrils of smoke had either dissipated or turned into stationary clouds.

Several minutes later, there was still no sign of the kid, and the wind had stilled, turning the last remnants of smoke into a dull yellow haze. She’d found one more small brushfire, but it had nearly burned out on its own; she doused what was left and kept moving.

The off-roader was parked next to a boulder just over the next ridge; its tanks were nearly empty. Ev was still nowhere to be seen.

A flash of movement about twenty feet up in a pine tree caught her eye. She shaded her eyes and looked again; someone was waving something small and orange between the needles.

“Did he get stuck up a tree?” Joanna marveled aloud as she broke into a jog.

“Hey, Miz Joanna,” Ev called as she approached, “I, um, I didn’t know what do to so I climbed up here. My knife’s not working! Do we have a pair of shears?”

“Not working for what?” she called back. Part of the top of the tree had been stripped off, and several branches on the way down were broken.

“I’m trying to get him free,” Ev hollered, “and it’s not working!” He sounded like he was on the verge of panic. “What do I do?”

“Easy, tiger. Who are you trying to get free?” Joanna unbuckled the firefighting tank; if she was going to have to climb the tree, too, she was damned well not doing so in that thing.

A flutter of white fabric flashed between her and the source of Ev’s voice. “I think it’s the pilot,” Ev said less loudly. “I think he must have ejected, but too low, and he got thrown into the tree before his parachute completely unfurled.”

Joanna’s heart kicked into high gear. “Is he still _alive_?” she gasped. Sure enough, behind the billowing remains of the parachute, she could see Ev wedged in a fork in the tree, and something white and red dangling from the branch in front of him.

“Well,” Ev answered breathlessly, “he’s breathing. He’s also bleeding. Like, when I got here, there was a _lot_ of blood, although I think I got the worst of it stopped for right now. And his parachute is all tangled in the tree, and the straps are made of something too tough for me to cut through with a knife.” One of the branches shook as Ev shifted his weight. “Miz Joanna, if we don’t get him down, he’s either going to bleed out or he’s going to suffocate from the way these straps are pressing on his chest. He’s - he’s not a big guy, he’s smaller than me, he can’t have that much blood to lose. We can’t just leave him here!”

“We’re not going to,” Joanna assured him. “If nothing else, we’ve never had a chance to interrogate one of them before. Maybe we can get something useful out of him. But even if we can’t, I ain’t leaving anyone up a tree to bleed to death.” She reached for her radio. “Hey, Pup, you still in the rig?”

The radio crackled back, “Yes, ma’am. Did we miss a spot?”

“Nope,” she replied, “but our boy Ev found the pilot, still breathing; he tried to eject and got caught up one of these pines. We didn’t have the foresight to bring a ladder, so if you’re good on power, we need you and the exo to come help them both down. Can you track my comlink signal?”

“You’re coming through clear,” the radio answered. “Should be there in ten minutes. Pup out.”

“I don’t know if he can keep breathing for ten minutes,” Ev quavered. “His respiration’s gotten a lot slower and shallower since I got up here.”

“You took first aid?” Joanna figured if someone with Ev’s maturity level knew the word ‘respiration’ and could use it correctly, that was a pretty safe guess.

“Yeah, after that other driver died on me I figured I should learn,” Ev answered in a shaking voice, “but I’m not great at it, and I haven’t got any supplies to work with. I already used my shirt to stop the worst of the bleeding.”

“That would be why you were waving your hat at me instead,” Joanna guessed. She moved around until she was directly under Ev; the dangling mass of white and red resolved into a human figure in a closed helmet and a white jumpsuit liberally streaked with both blood and soot. One leg was hanging at an odd angle; it was probably broken, but it didn’t look shattered. Ev’s green plaid shirt was tied around the unconscious pilot’s upper arm and was half-soaked through with red. Small guy, too; Ev wasn’t kidding about him being shorter. “Is it just the parachute straps holding him up?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Ev called back. “The jumpsuit is caught on a broken branch, too. That’s why I thought maybe I could cut him loose.”

Joanna unholstered her soul blaster. “Can you hold on to him? I don’t wanna risk him just falling out of the tree. No point in adding more broken bones to whatever he’s already taken.”

Ev stared at her, open-mouthed, for a moment, then inched a foot along the branch the pilot dangled from. He curled his hands in the loose fabric around the shoulders of the pilot’s jumpsuit. “I think I got him,” he shouted down.

“Hold on tight and don’t move,” Joanna commanded. As long as the wind didn’t pick up and flap the parachute around, this wasn’t going to be a tricky shot, but that was a non-trivial pile of ‘if’. She steadied the blaster with both hands, then fired four times.

“Whoa, dude!” Ev flattened against the branch, first out of reflex, then because the burden in his hands had just become much heavier. The white fabric of the parachute fluttered halfway to the ground and hung up on the bark of the tree.

“Sorry,” Joanna said, allowing herself a small smile. “No shears, but I figured that would do just as well. Did that take the pressure off?”

“I think so,” Ev grunted, “but tell Pup to hurry. He’s not heavy, but this is a really awkward angle.”

Joanna checked her own comlink; the lights indicating Pup’s and Ev’s proximities were both blinking green now. “He’ll be here in no time,” Joanna assured him.

Hopefully, it would be enough time for her to figure out what they were going to do with their very first prisoner of war.

\---

The goodbyes had been more awkward than Jaeris had expected. Either clinginess was a general property of Omega cyborgs, or House Critic had remarkably similar tastes in henchpeople; either way, Nella Omega had nearly broken down in tears in the process of sending Lady Critic off. She and Lady Maven assured everyone that they could take care of the _Loose Cannon_ and the black hole while Lady Critic did some fast diplomacy, and the little dog that Todd was apparently so fascinated with had made a brief appearance, during which Todd was reduced to cooing at it. Once she was on board, Lady Critic tried to shove her luggage (which turned out to be a steamer trunk, an overnight bag, and a rather large hatbox) onto Film Brain before remembering that he was Linkara’s subject instead of hers; fortunately, a short blue robot had shown up with a luggage trolley and ended that little scene before Linkara lost his cool again.

Lady Critic had retired to her chambers, then almost immediately turned up back on the bridge once she discovered that the _Nimue_ ’s accommodations were only slightly nicer than standard naval barracks. In the interest of keeping her from wandering around, Linkara had suggested that she take the communications console, and she had agreed suspiciously quickly. From what Jaeris could see from his seat, she seemed to be typing up a letter.

“Information: Ship is approaching Avatar Station,” Nimue announced. “Docking range in six minutes.”

Linkara straightened his tunic. “Shall we let them know we’re coming?” he asked no one in particular.

“We’d better,” Lady Critic advised. “I don’t know if whoever they have manning the main docks will have ever seen a Paladin ship before; they certainly won’t be expecting either of us.”

“Radio frequencies open,” Film Brain stated.

Linkara rose from his chair. “Greetings, Avatar Station!” he began. “I am Captain Linkara of Zord, Master of the Arsenal of the Holy Order of the Paladins of Zord; this is my personal ship, the _Nimue_. I and the Lady Critic of Nostalgia have come to request an audience with the Master of the Station, and to re-provision my ship. Permission to dock requested.”

The radio buzzed softly for a moment. The voice that finally responded was hard to hear, despite the lack of static: “Request received, _Nimue_. Please wait for further instructions.”

Linkara looked irritated, but all he said was, “Todd, Film Brain, take her into orbit around Avatar until they respond.”

Jaeris looked out the windows at the station. Like Palladium, Avatar was a converted asteroid, but the resemblance ended there. For one thing, it was a rocky silicate asteroid rather than a nickel-iron one. The original rock-ball had been nearly large enough to be labeled a dwarf planet; it had compressed into a rough ellipsoid, instead of the irregular potato shape most asteroids took. The interior had been made habitable by carving out vast caverns, tiny warrens, and miles of corridors in the glassy rock; some of that material had then been used to build outposts on the surface, but the rest had been made into curious low-grav sculptures and electroplated with a thin layer of gold. As more sculptures had been added to its surface over time, more and more of its obsidian surface had been gilded. Now, it looked like an ornate ornament hanging in empty space, covered with glittering swirls and squiggles.

Film Brain sat up in his chair. “They’re sending us a digital form to fill out, sir,” he said, eyes tracking data only he could see.

“Put it on screen,” Linkara ordered. 

The image that appeared was, indeed, a standard bureaucratic form, with blanks for every member of Linkara’s and Lady Critic’s entourages, their planets of origin, their social status, and so on. Linkara ran his hand down his face and groaned, “I know we ask people to be put on a guest list to visit us, but isn’t this a little excessive?”

“Well, you can’t be too careful around here,” Lady Critic noted carefully. “After all, there are pirates around.”

“Just fill out the damn form and send it back,” Todd grumbled.

“Let me handle that,” Lady Critic offered, reaching for the touchpad on the console in front of her. Jaeris could see her cutting and pasting from the document she’d already prepared; clearly, she’d known this was coming, or at least that it was likely.

“Where did all the gold come from?” Jaeris asked idly as she typed.

“Information: The asteroid belt of the star Ultima is unusually rich in deposits of gold, silver, platinum, and mercury,” Nimue replied from the console in front of him. “The asteroid that became Avatar Station contained a sizable vein of gold, which permitted the great-great-grandfather of the current Lord British to pay for its conversion to a habitable station. Originally, only a small sculpture garden was intended to be gilded in memory of the discovery, but as similar deposits were discovered throughout the asteroid belt and commercial mining began, a community of artists and sculptors specializing in low-gravity art also accumulated on the station, using precious metals as part of the electromagnetic apparatus that holds the sculptures to the station. Surface gravity on Avatar Asteroid is only one thirty-sixth of a standard gravitational unit, so electromagnetic fields are used instead.”

“More than I wanted to know,” Jaeris chuckled, “but thanks.”

“Quit distracting me while I fill this out,” Lady Critic growled.

A few moments after she hit “Transmit,” the radio stated, “Permission to dock granted for the Paladin ship _Nimue_. Please proceed on ion thrust only to Dock 4B as shown on the station map. Station personnel will inform you whether the Master of the Station, Lord Bard, approves your request for a -”

The voice was interrupted by a louder, rougher one. “I approve. Lady Critic, I’m free for dinner at 1800 hours station time; you and your new bodyguards are welcome to join me in my private dining hall. You remember where that is, right?”

“Of course I remember,” Lady Critic chuckled. “I shall be pleased to join you, and to introduce my traveling companions.”

“See you then,” said the voice that must have been Lord Bard. The radio went silent, then the first voice returned, sounding slightly cowed. “Er, well then. Can I do anything else to assist you?”   
“What’s the current time, station time?” Linkara asked, sounding nearly as puzzled.  
“Current station time is 1630 hours,” the voice said. “Will there be anything else?”

“No, that’s fine,” Linkara said. “Proceeding to Dock 4B. Uh, thanks.”

“We wish you a pleasant stay on Avatar Station, _Nimue_. Let us know if you require any assistance,” said the poor spaceport manager, and the radio cut off.

Linkara shook his head, then turned snappily on one heel and marched towards the turbolift.

Todd’s swiveled to match his motion. “Where are you going?” he wondered.

“To get into my dress uniform,” Linkara answered. “We’re having dinner with two members of the royal family.”

Jaeris, Todd, and Film Brain shared a glance. “Uh, I don’t have a thing to wear,” Jaeris said weakly. The other two nodded, looking mildly worried.

Lady Critic laughed. “What you have on is fine,” she assured them. “The Master of the Station is a lot less formal than you might imagine. As far as the station personnel are concerned, Todd and Jaeris are Linkara’s and my bodyguards, respectively, and Film Brain is Linkara’s personal digital assistant.” She shrugged apologetically at Todd. “Sorry, it was the only way they’d let you bring your weapons, and I didn’t figure leaving one of the Instruments of Dark Pa’au or a soul blaster on the ship was a great idea, either.”

Linkara was still walking. “Either way,” he called over his shoulder, “I need a shower. Nimue, bring the ship around into docking position.”

“Acknowledged,” the ship replied.

\---

Joanna leaned against the side of the transport and wheezed. Running along the uneven ground had taken the wind right out of her; she envied Pup and Ev their relative youth nearly as much as she did the vehicles she’d foolishly assigned them. They’d beaten her here by several minutes, of course; their unconscious prisoner lay on top of a folded tarp on the bed of the transport, just behind the cab. Ev was in the last stages of winching the firefighting exoskeleton back into its place, taking up most of the rest of the bed, along with the offroader.

Pup caught the winch hook as Ev lowered it back over the side. “C’mon, Miz Joanna,” he urged, “let’s get you out of the pack and get underway. There’s not a whole lot we can do for this guy out here.”

She’d forgotten she was still wearing the extinguisher backpack, partly because it was almost empty; Joanna hit the quick-release buckles and wriggled out of the shoulder straps. “Okay,” she panted as she slid the winch hook under the back strap, “which one of us has the most experience with first aid?”

Pup and Ev exchanged a glance. “That’d be you, ma’am,” they said in near-unison.

“Great,” she groaned.

“We left Eliza with Lise,” Pup reminded her, “and she’s kind of the upslope medic. I can do really basic wound care, but that’s about it.”

“I took that field first aid course a couple of months ago,” Ev added, “but I’m totally no expert.”

Joanna pondered that for a moment. “You’re both certified to drive this thing, right?” she asked as Ev secured the backpack and its tanks.

“Yeah,” they chorused.

“Sounds like the best option would be for me and Ev to both ride in the back and take turns keeping our prisoner alive,” she mused. “If you need to swap out with one of us, Pup, just let us know.”

“Nah, it’s a short trip,” he assured her. “I’ll be fine.”

Ev’s head popped over the top railing of the transport bed. “There’s a first aid kit in the big tool crate back here,” he said, holding up a white box that might originally have been designed for fishing tackle. “I’m going to go ahead and start bandaging him up, okay?”

“Get on it,” Joanna agreed. “I’ll join you in just a sec.” She turned to Pup. “I know you’re going to want to hurry,” she murmured, “and you ain’t wrong, but don’t overdo it - these roads have been bombed to crap and gone, and they weren’t great to begin with.”

“I get it, safety first,” Pup agreed. “Now go save that poor bastard’s life.”

Joanna scurried up the ladder into the transport bed. She was pretty sure that Ev had already done that; all she was here to do was clean up. As she knelt on the edge of the tarp, Ev was putting away the sterile cover from a pneumatic autobandage and attaching a small sawhead to a rotary tool.

“We only opened up one wound getting him in here, and I already patched that up,” Ev explained. “I don’t want to move his head any more than we already have, but the respirator on the helmet’s not really working and he’s gonna need more air. I’m gonna try cutting through the seal on the faceplate.”

“Can you do that with the transport in motion?” As if to punctuate her question, the truck lurched heavily to the left as Pup started the vehicle downslope.

“If you hold him steady, yeah,” Ev replied. He pressed the cutting wheel to the seam between the helmet’s faceplate and the body of the helmet; it squealed in protest, but the material slowly parted in its wake. Joanna shifted so the top of the helmet was between her knees and held on.

It was ten long minutes before Ev was done; the transport was back on the main road and rattling downhill at a decent clip. He slipped a ragged and soot-stained fingernail through the crack left by the saw and gently pulled the mirrored faceplate away.

The man inside was young, but clearly a man, not a kid; he was probably a little younger than Joanna, but not by much. His hair had been cut short, almost but not quite what Joanna thought of as military short, and it was already receding across a high forehead despite his relative youth. He wore a neatly trimmed vandyke beard; at first, that surprised her on a military grunt, but it was very similar to the style Lord Critic himself sported - perhaps it was part of the uniform. His face was round and pale, and the first hints of laugh lines marked the corners of his mouth and eyes.

He did not look like what she expected one of the anonymous fighter pilots who had bombed the hell out of her planet’s landscape to look like. She had expected someone meaner, tougher-looking. This pilot looked like he’d be more at home sitting around a card table, chuckling over a dwindling pile of chips.

“He’s not that much older than Pup, is he?” Ev breathed at her shoulder.

“No, he’s not,” she agreed. “His color’s not bad for someone who’s lost a lot of blood, either; let’s hope he’s got youthful resilience in his favor, too.”

She wasn’t quite sure what Ev mumbled next, but it sounded something like, “He can have some of mine.”

\---

Dock 4B was just barely large enough to accommodate the _Nimue_. For once, Jaeris was happy to let a computer bring the ship in; even with a Gunslinger’s aim, he wasn’t positive he could’ve made it through the doors without scratching the paint.

It genuinely had not occurred to him to bring more than one change of clothes and a spare pair of boxers on his quest; the _Stratocaster_ ’s tiny autolaundrette couldn’t handle more than a day’s clothing, anyway. He’d settled for dusting his hat carefully and changing into a clean shirt, after letting one of Nimue’s service bots steam it. 

Film Brain was technically even worse off, having only the clothes he was wearing. Nimue and the blue robot (no one ever introduced him, but Jaeris guessed that was Pollo) went through the ship’s inventory and managed to come up with both a pair of black pants and a white shirt with ruffled sleeves that came close to fitting Film Brain, along with some polish for his shoes. Once they’d brushed his hair back and rolled up the trouser legs into impromptu cuffs, he looked, if not formal, at least like he hadn’t spent the last two years climbing around in a hydroponics system. 

Todd had ducked back into the _Kali_ (which, Jaeris could say now with certainty, did not look anything like its namesake) and returned in what was effectively the same outfit as before, except that the shoulders of the loose shirt had sharper corners, the cloak was neatly pleated, and a black satin sash ran from his left shoulder to his right hip. Jaeris suspected it was hiding the keytar’s strap.

Linkara’s dress uniform was cream instead of white, with dark umber boots polished to a glossy shine and a cape in the same shade. Both the tunic of the uniform and the edges of the cape were decorated in thin gold braid. He hadn’t changed the tweed trilby, which didn’t quite match the dress cape, but he’d added a hatband in the same gold braid around it, which made the mismatch less obvious.

Lady Critic surveyed them with a skeptical eye, then shrugged. “You’ll do,” she said. “Is there an actual physical exit from the ship, or just the teleporters?”

“There is one, but it’s in the cargo bay,” Linkara replied. “Not exactly a grand entrance.”

She nodded. “Transport us down, then, at your leisure.”

“You heard the lady, Nimue,” Linkara said brightly. “Teleport us to the dock entrance.” The glittering effect surrounded them, and suddenly they were standing on a circle of thick carpet.

It was red. Dark red, but still red. Jaeris had thought that was just an expression.

A pair of security guards in blue tunics at the edge of the carpet jumped to attention. “Welcome to Avatar Station, Lady Critic, Sir Linkara!” the shorter one barked. “The Master of the Station requests your presence in his private dining hall. Please follow me.”

Lady Critic waved dismissively. “I know how to get there,” she assured them.

“We have been assigned to escort you,” the guard replied, and her taller companion nodded briskly. “Please follow me.” She turned and marched towards a large sliding door; Lady Critic scowled, but gathered her skirts and followed after.

They fell into a steady marching order in the long hallway that followed: the first guard, Lady Critic, Todd, Linkara, Film Brain, Jaeris, and the second guard bringing up the rear. The guard behind him seemed to spend half his time eyeing Jaeris suspiciously and the other half watching behind him; Jaeris wondered whether the station was actually dangerous, or if this guard was just extra-paranoid. The hallways seemed safe enough, with high ceilings carved from the smooth black stone of the asteroid and buttressed with arches of chrome-plated metal. Occasionally this hallway intersected a cross-corridor, and the two guards would pick up the pace until they were past it.

After what seemed like several minutes’ marching, the first guard paused at a large door framed in gold leaf and pressed her open hand to a small palmplate half-hidden against the dark stone wall. The door irised open; she turned to face her charges. “Please place your hand on the scanner as you walk though,” she instructed. 

Jaeris watched as everyone did so. The indicator light blinked green as soon as Lady Critic touched it. For Todd and Linkara, it blinked amber several times before turning green and staying lit. For Film Brain, it blinked red, them amber, then green, never staying steady. When he pressed his own palm to it, he felt it buzz lightly before the light came on at all; it blinked amber, then stayed amber. The guard behind him frowned, but said nothing.

This tunnel was narrower, with thicker carpet than the main hallway, and the walls were painted a soft golden-grey, like wheatstraw in the barn a few months after harvest. It also seemed to wind and twist more, with a camera at every bend in the corridor. It finally ended in an old-fashioned wooden door; the lead guard pressed her palm to another wall plate, and the door clunked loudly.

She pulled the iron ring in the door to open it and bowed low. “Enter,” she said, still facing the floor; the second guard joined her on the other side of the doorway and repeated the gesture.

Lady Critic swept through the door into the brightly lit room behind it; Todd looked like a walking silhouette against the light streaming into the hallway. Jaeris paused as he cleared the sill to look around, blinking against the illumination.

The room was large enough to park the _Stratocaster_ in, although just barely. The ceiling was white and irregular, covered with the sort of insulation one might put down to absorb sound as well as keep in heat. The floor was covered with some sort of tile that mimicked the appearance of wood, but was softer underfoot and probably easier to clean. The walls were the same white as the ceiling, interrupted regularly with tapestries and draperies that illustrated wildly colorful battle scenes, some fantastic, some just bloody. 

They had entered in the middle of the long axis of the room; to their left was a long table ornately carved out of reddish hardwood, set with five matching chairs and a sixth with a much higher back and arms. At the other end was a single oversized throne, carved from the black obsidian of the asteroid and covered in intricate gold patterns like its surface. It was occupied by a pale, slumping man in his thirties, wearing a black, blousy shirt and well-tailored black trousers similarly embroidered in spirals of gold. His hair was mid-length, dark, and wavy; his eyes were watery and rimmed in red. 

The expression on his face before he turned and saw them was one of existentially crushing ennui.

Lady Critic paused about twenty feet from the throne. “Lord Bard,” she intoned, “I request an audience with you concerning urgent matters of state between the Nostalgia and Ultima systems.”

The fellow’s face lit up as she spoke, as if he hadn’t quite registered their presence before; he uncoiled out of his beautiful but uncomfortable-looking chair and bounded forward to meet her. “Lady Critic!” he almost shouted. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She curtseyed lightly, and he sketched a short bow in reply. “First,” she continued, “let me introduce my traveling companions. First, my bodyguard, Todd of Twilight.”

Lord Bard extended a hand, which Todd took as he bowed low. The Master of the Station inspected Todd’s outfit closely, and his mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

“Next,” Lady Critic went on, “Sir Linkara, Master of the Arsenal of the Paladins of Zord.”

Lord Bard started to extend his hand again, then stopped with it half-open in midair. His face took on an expression that might have been equal parts recognition and puzzlement as he stared at the Paladin.

Linkara, for his part, seemed to have been turned to stone. His mouth was open as if he’d been about to speak, and then frozen in place. His eyes were fixed on Lord Bard’s face, and if Lord Bard seemed puzzled, Linkara looked both fascinated and terrified.

Film Brain gently cleared his throat and nudged Linkara with an elbow. Linkara jumped three inches, blurted “PleasedtomeetyouLordBardI’veheardsomuchaboutyou,” clasped Lord Bard’s half-extended hand between his, and bowed stiffly as if he’d been bent at the waist by some invisible giant.

“Please to meet you as well, Paladin Linkara,” Lord Bard replied, leaning to the side slightly, as if he were trying to keep Linkara’s face in view.

Lady Critic was clearly repressing a smile. “And in Sir Linkara’s retinue, Film Brain of Zord, his personal assistant, and Jaeris of Mellotron, his bodyguard.”

Jaeris watched Film Brain for his cue. Lord Bard didn’t extend a hand to Film Brain, and Film Brain didn’t reach for one; he just bowed nearly double. Jaeris wasn’t sure he was that flexible, but he removed his bowler and bowed as deeply as he could.

“Charmed,” Lord Bard said as they straightened. “Mellotron, eh? I think I see one reason you might be here.” His eyes flickered between Jaeris’s matched blaster pistols.

“Indeed,” Lady Critic said. “There are very important matters of diplomacy to attend to that may affect worlds well beyond our two. May I ask how secure this room is?”

Lord Bard held up one finger, turned back to the throne, and traced several of the curlicues on its left arm. The brightness level of the room dropped slightly, the lighting shifted from yelllow-tinted to slightly bluish, and the sound of the ventilation system shifted up half a note in pitch. Lord Bard held up a second finger, then a third one, then relaxed slightly. “As of right now,” he said, “it’s being monitored and recorded by my personal AI, and by nothing else. That’s as secure as anything on this station ever gets.” He threw himself back into the throne, propped his head on one elbow, and draped one leg over the other arm. “What’s up, Enchik?”

Lady Critic’s body language changed from regal formality to nervous frustration in an instant. She threw up her hands and then crossed them across her chest. “I think we’re gonna have to do it, Spoony,” she said. “I don’t see any other way to keep them from crushing the ecosystems and economies of half the planets in the galaxy.”

Lord Bard - had she just called him Spoony? - groaned and buried his face in his hands. “It’s won’t fix the underlying problem,” he moaned. “It’ll just give them a front to unite against.”

“A front that I’m pretty sure Tig won’t openly move against,” Lady Critic - Lady Enchik, if they were all going by given names now? - answered. “I think I could talk General Phelous into supporting us without any problems, and I’m 90% sure he can convince General Snob, and at that point Tig hasn’t got an army or a navy, just his one station.”

Obviously, the formality levels had just changed drastically; it was giving Jaeris a bit of conversational whiplash. He turned to Todd and whispered, “Is that Lord Critic’s given name?”

“Yup,” Todd whispered back. “He’s not real fond of it anymore, to be honest. What in the hell is wrong with Linkara?”

Jaeris glanced at the Paladin. Linkara was standing stock-still, sweating like a pig, and staring at the noble in the obsidian chair like he was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.

Jaeris whispered back to Todd, “Looks like love at first sight to me, but it could just be infatuation. He’s too pale for it to be lust.”

“Great,” Todd hissed through clenched teeth. “Another complication.”

Lord Spoony was shaking his head. “That doesn’t do a damn thing about the Nerd Pretender or any of the warlords he’s fighting on his other flank, even assuming Tig just doesn’t decide to start shooting that stupid disintegrator on anything that moves if he can’t have the imperial crown all to himself,” he insisted. “And, you know, I’m pretty sure whatever planet he’s above when he finds out is toast no matter what.”

Film Brain gingerly raised a hand. “How many other warlords are we talking about?” he asked. “General Phelous could never get good intelligence reports from the other side of Vidyan space, and Lord Critic didn’t seem to care as long as they were taking up the Nerd Emperor’s time and attention.”

“Well,” Lord Spoony replied, ticking them off on his fingers, “there’s about half a dozen assorted generals, warlords, and pretenders kicking around that octant of the galaxy, but the two most dangerous are Lord Yahtzee and the Dread Warlord Sterling. Sterling’s by far the greater threat; he’s a megalomaniac with huge economic reserves and a well-equipped standing army. He’s short on ships, though, and no one wants to manufacture them for him, because he’s a megalomaniac and personally just kind of gross. Lord Yahtzee is a nihilist asshole who’d rather see the galaxy burn than see someone else ruling it, but his economic resources and his forces are relatively small compared to Sterling’s, much less Tig’s or the Nerd Pretender’s.”

“That’s the second time you’ve called him that,” Jaeris said, ducking his head in what he hoped was a gesture of deference. “Do you actually think his claim is illegitimate?”

Lord Spoony gave him a curious glance. “Okay, before I answer that,” he said, pointing at Jaeris’s pistols, “are you one of the Gunslingers? Because official intel says you guys have been bombed into oblivion, but I know Tig lies his ass off about bullshit like that.”

“Sure am,” Jaeris agreed. “And we’re pretty far down, sir, but we’re sure not out yet.”

“Good to hear,” Lord Spoony grunted. “The truth is, everyone’s claim is sort of illegitimate. God-Emperor Malachite changed the rules of succession such that anyone who isn’t genetically his descendant can’t claim _his_ throne. Us royals are technically claiming the older version of the imperium by way of the Golden Emperor’s descendants, not Emperor Malachite’s. Everyone who could have possibly legitimately claimed Malachite’s imperium died or was murdered during the Year of Twelve Emperors.”

Lady Enchik waved her hands to cut him off. “They really, really don’t need a full course in the intricacies of imperial succession,” she insisted. “Basically, Spoony here - I’m sorry, Lord Bard, grand-nephew and heir apparent of Lord British, would have the best possible claim to the imperial crown under the current circumstances, except that he happens to be adopted.”

“And while technically that shouldn’t matter for the rules of succession under the Golden imperium,” Lord Spoony chimed in, “it does mean that pretty much everyone who _is_ a blood descendant of the Golden Emperor, no matter how far removed, is going to think his claim is more meaningful than mine.” He grimaced and spread his hands.

“That’s bullcrap,” Linkara spat, suddenly regaining his voice. “It’s a legal adoption, right? It’s the same as any other legal relationship.”

“I know that,” Lord Spoony sighed, “but try explaining that to a petty noble with two warships and an overdeveloped ego.” His voice dropped slightly. “I also happen to be a clone, which to some of these guys makes me not only not a legitimate heir, but also not really a person at all.”

“That’s so stupid!” Linkara raged. “What is it about these people that they can’t see clones and cyborgs and AIs as real people?” His face was red, now, instead of pale, and his hands clenched into empty fists.

“My case is a little odd,” Lord Spoony said, “but wow, man, thanks. I always thought the Paladins were on the other side of that issue.” His gaze focused on Linkara again, with that same odd expression of mingled familiarity and puzzlement.

“We used to be, a little bit,” Linkara admitted. “We were always against enslavement of sapient beings, no matter what their origins, and allowed them full citizenship on Zord, but there was historic discrimination against clones within the actual Paladin ranks.” His mouth shifted into a stern line. “One of the first things I did when I was appointed to the council was insist that be dropped. Not that we took many recruits after that at all, clone or otherwise, but at least I made sure that wasn’t the reason.”

Lord Spoony scowled slightly but said nothing in response.

“Anyway,” Lady Enchik started again, “while neither Spoony nor I are particularly interested in each other romantically, adding the Critic lineage to the combined Bard and British lineages would cement any child of ours as clearly the imperial heir, which would by extension make Spoony the natural choice for our wing of the galaxy to unite under. I’m pretty sure Tig would eventually get with the program, even if he might spend a year or two pitching a fit. I’m also pretty sure General MovieBob would come over to our side from Sterling’s if we bribed him hard enough; he knows his own claim is too weak to go anywhere, and that Sterling has a public relations problem the size of a Dyson sphere. That would leave us in the best possible position against the Nerd Emperor and the other warlords.”

“But it’s still a mess,” Spoony griped. “We’d still have all-out war against the Nerd Pretender; he’ll never accept me on the throne. It’s possible he and Dread Lord Sterling would form an alliance, albeit one that’s unstable as fucking on a ladder.”

Linkara’s cheeks flamed pink. Jaeris wondered for a moment if he were going to have to catch the Paladin, but he only wobbled slightly.

“That’s the worst-case scenario,” Lady Enchik agreed reluctantly. “Well, that and Tig going off with Station Awesome and sulking somewhere.”

Spoony pressed his lips together and blew air soundlessly through them. “Then there’s the business of actually producing an heir,” he pointed out.

Jaeris glanced between Lord Spoony and Lady Enchik. Both of them looked like this prospect ranked somewhere around the same enthusiasm level as mucking out stables. He didn’t quite get it; on the one hand, sure, it wasn’t ever going to be like what he and Joanna had, but they weren’t soulbonders anyway - and it wasn’t as if either of them was unattractive. He totally understood what Todd had seen, and what Linkara was currently seeing. Confused, he glanced at Todd again, hoping he was just missing some inside information; Todd just shook his head.

Weakly, Linkara asked, “Is there any way to unite the Nostalgian houses behind Lord Bard without the marriage? Can’t you just throw your support to him?”

“I can’t really act against my brother as a free agent,” Lady Enchik answered, pouting a bit. “As the male heir, he speaks for the House, no matter how much everyone else might wish otherwise. One of the big reasons I took up piracy was to have my own agency separate from his, or the House’s. If we only had the adoption issue to deal with, or only the clone issue, we might have a shot at rallying the other noble houses, but with both of them?” She sighed deeply and seemed to deflate a bit. “Tig wouldn’t give in. He just wouldn’t. It has to be something as formal and legally binding as a marriage, or he’ll just ignore it and keep tearing apart what he claims he wants to bring together.”

Linkara closed his eyes, took three deep breaths, rubbed at the bridge of his nose, and looked back up; his coloration was still an odd blotchy combination of flushed and pale, but he at least didn’t look like he’d taken a hammer between the eyes. “Then we’re back where we were when we decided to come here,” he explained, deliberately focusing on Lady Enchick rather than Lord Spoony. “We need to find some way to take out the disintegrator beams and the asteroid cannon. If we can neutralize those, then we can create our own power base that will be more attractive to the nobles across the galactic arm and make some reasonable promises of safety. And it makes a lot more sense to put those in the hands of another contender for the throne than in some coalition of the mystic orders, which is what we currently have.”

“Yeah,” Lord Spoony interrupted, “what’s up with that?”

“One of the dedicants of my order had a vision that Mellotron can be saved from Lord Critic if we unite, quote, ‘the three near-empty orders,’ unquote,” Jaeris explained. “So we’ve got the three of us, but the prophesy didn’t exactly give instructions on what to do next.”

Lord Spoony chewed on that for a moment, then turned to Todd. “I’m guessing you’re exactly who and what you look like you are, and you’re out for vengeance on the Nerd Pretender for the rest of your order?”

“Yes on the first, close enough on the second,” Todd answered.

“So what’s your stake in Tig’s mess?” Lord Spoony went on. “Is it just that this dude with the braid and the blasters and the prophesy showed up and got you off your ass, or is there something deeper going on?”

“That, and I got sick and tired of being alone on Twilight,” Todd said, shrugging. “No one else lives there. _I_ wasn’t really living there, just parking my ass and waiting. I needed someone to jam with. Jaeris and Film Brain were the first two people to show up and ask.” He clasped his hands in front of him. “Just melody’s not enough, eventually. You need some harmonies. You know?”

Lord Spoony nodded, then studied something on the ceiling. “And you and Enchik?” he asked, vaguely.

Todd glanced across at her; they shared a look and a couple of eyebrow wiggles. Turning back towards Lord Spoony, Todd sighed, “I’m not going to claim there’s nothing between us. There’ll always be something between us. But I have no idea what exactly it is, anymore, and until I actually decide I’m not a Shadow Knight anymore, I still have my vows. I’m not going to get in the way of a political marriage, if that’s where you’re going with this.”

“I was a little worried,” Lord Spoony conceded. He turned towards Linkara, but didn’t quite face him. “And you? What’s your story, Paladin?”

Linkara managed to look everywhere except directly at Lord Spoony. “I’m the youngest member of the Paladin High Council, and currently, I’m the only one who can travel off-planet, for reasons I’m not at liberty to discuss,” he mumbled, embarrassment turning him a delightful shade of deep rose. “Less than three days ago, a near-superluminal asteroid was fired at Zord from somewhere just outside the system, the same way one was fired at Penumbra three years ago. Sometime between the two events, someone hacked our security system to only fire on ships, not asteroids or comets. Jaeris, Film Brain, and Todd had just arrived on the planet looking for us. If it hadn’t been for Jaeris, I wouldn’t have been able to react to the threat, and if it hadn’t been for Film Brain, I wouldn’t have known about it. Now, I want to see justice done to the Nerd Emperor for the assassination attempt on the entire Council, and to Lord Critic for what he did to Jaeris’s world and to Film Brain.” His voice dropped as he clenched one fist. “I owe them some favors.”

Lord Spoony nodded. He looked as if we were about to speak when a chime rang at the other end of the room. “Tell you what,” he said as another wooden door slid open and the scent of something savory wafted through the room, “let’s take a dinner break and then get back to this once we’ve had a bite.”

“Sure,” Jaeris said, realizing he hadn’t had an actual meal in over eight hours. He couldn’t identify a single ingredient in what he was smelling, but it made his stomach growl all the same.

\---

The garage was far too warm, and it reeked of compressed hydrocarbon fuel and engine exhaust. Joanna eased herself over the side of the transport bed and ran around to the back to unhook the tailgate. Pup had obviously had the same idea; he nearly plowed right into her. She waved him off, ordering, “Go get a stretcher or a gurney or something; we need to move this guy and I’m pretty sure he has at least one broken bone.”

The door from the garage into the bunker banged open and Eliza hustled out, shoving a cot on a flatbed dolly in front of her. Paw shrugged and grabbed a corner, guiding it to the edge of the transport.

Eliza shoved her blue-dyed hair behind her ears. Like Ev, she was wearing her night-vision shades despite it being early afternoon; fleetingly, Joanna wondered whether that was just in style for the youngsters these days. That could wait, though; for the moment, their priority was getting their patient and prisoner stable and conscious enough to talk. She pointed back up behind the cab of the transport and stated, “Pup, I need you to help Ev bring him down here; try and lift the tarp instead of him, and we’ll just slide him on. Eliza, what can we do for blood loss and a fracture?”

“The fracture should be easy as long as it’s not compound,” Eliza replied, squinting towards the back of the transport. “I’ve still got several injections’ worth of bone-growth accelerant, and setting it just takes a little muscle. Blood loss may be more complicated; we have plenty of saline and some synthetic plasma, but we’re out of whole blood and platelets.”

Pup appeared from behind the firefighting exo backside-first, carrying a folded corner of the tarp in each hand. Ev’s orange cap bobbed behind him; the poor kid was sweating like a glass of iced tea. Joanna reached up to help steady the tarp as they pivoted in place. Looking down, Pup shook his head and asked, “Can we move the cot so it’s parallel to the tailgate? That way we can just lower him over the edge, and you two don’t have to figure out how we can hand him off.”

“No problem,” Eliza agreed, swinging the dolly around. “Just try not to move his head too much.”

“I put an inflatable collar on him just in case,” Ev told her, “although since I wasn’t sure if taking the helmet off was a good idea, it’s sort of not fitting exactly.”

“As long as he can breathe, we’re good there,” Eliza assured him. She watched carefully as they lowered her patient down. “He’s a little fellow, isn’t he?” she mused to Joanna.

“He’s a fighter pilot,” Joanna reminded her. “Some of those cockpits are pretty compact. It makes sense they’re recruit some shorter guys.”

“Do you want him restrained?” Eliza asked as she settled the tarp onto the folding cot. 

Pup straightened up and rubbed his lower back as he stretched. “I don’t think he’s too big a risk for running with that busted leg,” he pointed out.

“No,” Eliza argued, “but he could try and hurt someone. He’s an enemy soldier, remember. He was trying to bomb the snot out of us a few hours ago!”

“I don’t think he’ll try and attack anyone,” Ev said quietly. “He’s too badly hurt. If he tried, he’d just open up the gash in his arm and start bleeding out again.”

That actually made Joanna’s decision easier. “Then we should probably have some simple restraints for his own sake. He’s going to wake up in a completely unfamiliar place, and it probably won’t take long for him to realize he’s not in Lord Critic’s infirmary; we don’t want him trying to bolt for it and hurting himself worse,” she stated. “Just a couple of cuffs keeping him attached to the medbed should be sufficient.”

Eliza nodded. “Makes sense to me. Let’s get him where I can see how much blood he’s lost, and whether I have enough plasma to make a difference.” She gripped the cart tightly with both hands and headed for the door into the bunker.

“He can have some of mine!” Ev blurted.

Joanna turned to look at the boy. “You’re getting awful invested in this fellow,” she noted.

“Yeah, I know,” Ev said, shaking his head, “but - I just - I don’t want him to die. I need him not to die. I want to know why someone would follow Lord Critic, what they think they’re fighting for, and - and I have this gut feeling like he survived being shot down for a reason.” His head came up, and Joanna could see fresh tear streaks in the soot and dirt on his face. “Please, Miz Joanna, I haven’t given blood in three months. I have enough.”

Pup laid a hand on Ev’s shoulder. “At a minimum, we can see if your blood types are compatible,” he suggested. “I’m pretty sure Eliza’s diagnostic machine can do that without her help.”

“I’m O positive,” Ev said as Pup steered him towards the door. “Unless he’s a negative, I should be good.”

Joanna followed after them. Maybe their captive pilot would be reasonable, once he saw they’d patched him up; letting Ev play good cop was fine with her.

\---

Jaeris was convinced he was using the wrong fork. Fortunately, no one had said anything yet.

He wasn’t entirely sure when the last time he’d seen this much food in his life was - probably back in college. There had been a soup course (with rolls), a salad course (with thick slices of a really crusty bread), a meat course (with a very soft, fluffy bread and a leafy vegetable that was barely cooked at all), a fish course that everyone had turned down except for Todd, a cup of clear broth that probably didn’t count as a course (with another round of the crusty bread), and finally a dessert course. Jaeris had recognized absolutely none of it except for the breads. Everything had way more herbs and spices and way less salt and pepper than he was used to, which made it all seem bland and rich at the same time. The dessert was made of alternating layers of some sort of stewed fruit, slices of what appeared to be a very fluffy, crumbly cake, and a sort of rich eggy soft custard, ending with the fruit on top; no single part of it was very heavy, but the overall effect was, and Jaeris was only managing to pick out and eat bits of the fruit. The texture reminded him of peaches or nectarines, but the flavor was more berry-like.

Poor Film Brain was sitting at his plate toying with a slice of the bread. He’d tasted the soup, then whispered something to the butlers that came to clear away the dishes, and after that they hadn’t put a place setting in front of him for any of the other courses. Jaeris had figured out by now that guts were one thing Lord Critic had deprived Film Brain of, but he hadn’t quite realized how awkward that must be for a cyborg.

Idly, he wondered whether Nella Omega could eat; she seemed to still have most of her original torso. Then again, if he hadn’t heard Film Brain’s story, it wouldn’t have been obvious that his midsection wasn’t organic. Should he be calling him Film Brain Omega? Wait, no, he’d heard Film Brain give his new legal name to the computer on Zord. And he wasn’t going to start calling Lord Critic by Lord Tig, either.

But sitting at the table with them, listening to them laughing at each other’s stories of the perils of piracy and running an independent station, it was very hard to think of the two royals as Lord Bard and Lady Critic. They were clearly just Spoony and Enchik to each other.

Jaeris tried to imagine Lord Spoony on the throne of chrome and rubies at the palace on Vidya, wearing the imperial crown, sitting ramrod straight and issuing orders for the far reaches of their spiral arm. He almost couldn’t do it, and when he did manage to put the image together, Emperor Bard was clearly miserable, faking every minute of it.

Imagining Lady Enchik on that throne was easier, and didn’t make him feel nervous in the same way. Lord Spoony’s sense of humor was callous and a bit careless; Lady Enchik’s could be cruel, but it was controlled. Her reign would be a logical one, an imperium of utilitarian decisions and economic prosperity. But there was an iciness to her that the responsibility of the crown would bring out, or at least Jaeris’s gut told him so. If the logical thing to do was sacrifice a system to gain a strategic advantage, she would do so and never shed a tear.

And yet these two were the best possible choices, or at least it seemed like it. Lord Critic was right the heck out. Nothing Jaeris had seen or heard about the Nerd Emperor made him seem any better, especially after wiping out the Shadow Knights and trying to do the same to the Paladins. He didn’t know anything about the warlords, but they all sounded pretty awful.

Surely there had to be a better solution. Jaeris poked the dessert with what he was now pretty sure was the fork for the fish course he hadn’t eaten. It didn’t matter; he was stuffed, and even if he hadn’t been, thinking about the future wasn’t terribly appetizing. When the butlers came back to clear away the dishes, Jaeris was only too happy to see them go.

Lord Spoony hauled himself to his feet, groaning. “I keep telling the chefs to keep it simple,” he griped, “but no, every time I have company they have to show off. Bring the chairs over here; if there are any bugs we’ve missed they’re on this end of the room.” He plopped back into his throne and toyed with the gold chasing; Jaeris figured there must be switches and circuits hidden in the swirls, but he still wasn’t sure what they could be attached to. He grabbed his chair and added it to a ragged arc in front of the throne.

“So, we basically have two tasks we have to complete,” Todd started. “One, we have to neutralize both Lord Critic and the Nerd Emperor as immediate threats to Mellotron, Zord, and anywhere else they might be threatening to blow the hell up. Two, we have to keep that from creating a power vacuum that results in someone even worse swooping in and blowing things the hell up. Is that the basic situation?”

“This is so much bigger than what I thought I signed up for,” Jaeris mumbled miserably through his fingers. “I just wanted my home planet to be safe.”

Lady Enchik nodded. “That’s the long and short of it. We can accomplish part two by presenting Spoony’s and my engagement as a done deal, _if_ we can manage to neutralize both Tig and the Nerd Emperor more or less simultaneously _and_ we can ensure the loyalty of the generals through large enough bribes.” She sighed, glanced at Spoony, winced slightly, and continued, “That doesn’t guarantee that Tig or the Nerd Emperor or the warlords wouldn’t still be a problem, but at that point they’d be rebelling against the legal and regal consensus, and presumably not have their big guns to fall back on. It changes the situation from a combination of a civil war and a reconquest to putting down several rebellions.”

Linkara had been quietly staring at his own hands. Slowly, he looked up at Lady Enchik with a half-frown. “And what about you?” he asked. “Nothing I’ve seen so far tells me why a fierce pirate captain would choose to become a silent power behind the throne and an incubator for some true imperial heir. It’s obvious you consider it a sort of last resort. Could you stand it?”

“I’d have to,” Lady Enchik said, and the bitterness in her voice could have seasoned the entire banquet. “I’ve spent the last five years running from my responsibilities as a royal, exactly because I didn’t want to do this. Yes, of course, I’d much rather choose my own companions and not be tied down. I don’t think I’d make a particularly good mother, but we can hire nannies for that. But the other option is letting Tig and Nerd tear the galaxy to pieces.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve been ignoring it too long. I left Cucurbita system because the Nerd’s forces were getting too close, and I should have realized then that just because I could move and ignore them, that didn’t mean innocents weren’t going to suffer.”

Linkara swallowed loudly and turned to Lord Spoony. “And what about you, Lord Bard? Is this what you want?”

“Nope,” Lord Spoony said before Linkara had finished the last word. “It absolutely isn’t. I think of Enchik as more of a sister than a possible lover, for one thing; we were raised together, with me and her and Tig all having the same royal tutors back on Nostalgia.” He stared wetly at Linkara for a moment, then went on, “And I’d be a terrible emperor on my own. I don’t quite have the same impulse control issues that Tig and the Nerd Pretender have, but I have a pretty bad temper, too, and there are some days I just want to turn all the lights down and be left alone. You can’t do that and run a galaxy. Two-thirds of the time, I’d just be her puppet, and if something happened to her - I don’t want to think about it.” He shook his shoulders out and spread his hands. “But every other option looks even worse.”

Todd shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Okay, so let’s see if task one is even doable before we worry about task two. Enchik, where did the cloaked black hole come from?”

“I bought it off of Spoony,” she answered. “He got it to add to the defense arsenal of the station, but then he realized every time he tested it, it perturbed the station’s orbit.”

Lord Spoony nodded wryly. “It was too dangerous to keep anywhere near Avatar, or in any of the asteroid clusters. I didn’t want it leaving the system, so I sold it to the only person I could think of that I could trust with it.”

“And where did you get it?” Todd asked.

Lord Spoony went silent, tapping his fingers together. “Why do you want to know?” he finally replied.

“Because it’s almost in the same class as the disintegrator beam and the asteroid cannon,” Todd pointed out. “And while the black hole itself doesn’t eat up any energy, I’ll bet the cloak and whatever’s keeping it mostly stable have energy needs nearly as big as those two.”

“There’s a 2500 square kilometer solar cell array in the L4 point of the gas giant out there,” Lady Enchik admitted. “We don’t keep it cloaked all the time, and the cloak and the pseudostabilizer need every square centimeter to keep the batteries charged.”

“Did the array come with the black hole?” Jaeris asked.

“Yes,” Lady Enchik answered. “I don’t think it’s particularly special, though, is it?”

“It’s a much higher efficiency solar web than the standard ones,” Spoony said. “It came with the cloaking system.”

“And where did that come from?” Todd and Jaeris asked together.

Spoony pondered the question for what seemed like an age. Finally, he looked up at Jaeris. “I can’t answer that question without introducing you, and I don’t know if they’re up for company.” He glanced across at Linkara. “Although the circumstances are peculiar enough, they might. I can’t just send you, though; I’d have to come with you.”

“There’s plenty of room on the _Nimue_ ,” Linkara offered, a little too quickly.

“How did I know you were going to say that?” Lady Enchik muttered under her breath.

Lord Spoony grabbed the arms of his throne and pushed himself to his feet again. “Let me tell the stewards I’ll be doing some diplomacy for a couple of days,” he said, heading towards a door behind the throne that hadn’t been there before. It disappeared as soon as he walked through it.

“Well,” Film Brain chirped, “our party just keeps growing, doesn’t it?”

“The more the merrier,” Jaeris said, and hoped he was right.

\---

The infirmary had been painted a cheery shade of daffodil yellow since Joanna had last seen it. It certainly brightened up the place; the diode lights could almost be mistaken for afternoon sunlight. The yellow background also made Eliza’s blue-dyed hair and Ev’s orange cap pop. Even the dark reds that were all too much in evidence somehow looked less bleak. Joanna made a mental note to have the main infirmary back at the base redone in the same shade, if there was any more paint to be had.

Once Eliza had done a preliminary scan and found no evidence of neck or spinal injuries from their captive’s fall, she and Ev had removed his helmet and cut away his jumpsuit. That had taken longer than expected; the fabric over his torso was phenomenally tough. That was probably what had saved him from being impaled by any of the broken branches on his way down. The pilot’s right leg had been broken in two different places, but both breaks were relatively clean; Eliza had re-set the bones and immobilized the leg in a rigid plasticast. His right arm showed a hairline fracture of the ulna and some fairly severe muscle damage from what appeared to be a shrapnel wound. Three ribs on his right side were cracked, and hanging from the straps until Ev had found him hadn’t helped those either. Most of the rest of his injuries were heavy bruises and fairly shallow contusions from light shrapnel, possibly pieces of the fighter’s windshield; for those, Eliza had left the field dressings in place until she could seal up the primary injuries.

Ev was seated on the other side of the bed with a needle in the crook of his left elbow; a tube drew dark red fluid into the diagnostic device, and another fed it into another needle in the pilot’s left arm, a few inches below the pair of handcuffs that kept him shackled to the bed. For most of the past fifteen minutes, Ev’s eyes had been closed behind his infrared shades, but now they were open, watching Eliza as she maneuvered the tissue resealer around the pilot’s ragged arm wound.

For his part, the pilot seemed to be breathing much better than he had been in the transport. His left side was more or less unscathed, except for some surface cuts and one ugly scrape that had probably come from a tree branch. Eliza’s scans showed very little damage from the neck up; she guessed he was unconscious from a combination of shock and blood loss, not head trauma. The helmet had done its job. Once they got some blood back in him, he stood a good chance of recovery.

Only one other bed in the infirmary was occupied. Lise was sound asleep in the cot catty-corner from the prisoner’s. She’d been there since she and Ev had arrived, breathing regularly, eyes occasionally darting behind her closed lids as if she were dreaming.

“She didn’t say anything when it hit her?” Joanna asked, glancing back to Ev.

“Nothing in, like, actual words,” Ev answered. He rubbed at his eyes behind the shades with the hand that wasn’t attached to the machine. “She kind of yelped, and I stopped the train car to try and get a microphone switched on, like you said, but it was like she was watching a movie projected on the wall behind me. She was looking right through me, and then she squeaked, and her eyes rolled up in her head, and she passed out.” He turned towards the pilot, then to Lise, then back to Joanna. “Maybe she saw the crash?” he guessed.

“I can’t imagine that would have scared her so bad or used up so much of her psyche that she’d’ve fainted,” Joanna pointed out. “I mean, she’s seen worse and not passed out. When she got the vision that Lord Critic was coming, it knocked her on her butt, but she didn’t lose consciousness.”

Ev shuddered. “Not being in control of that must suck,” he mused. “How many Gunslingers have the whole prophesy thing?”

“Theoretically, anyone who has the perfect aim gift has the potential for it, and anyone who both has perfect aim and is a soulbonder will probably have it manifest at some point,” Joanna told him, “but in practice, for most of us that just means the occasional ominous dream. I’m absolute crap at it; I can’t even tell which dreams had precog flashes in them until after they happen. Jaeris can usually tell which ones are prophetic dreams, but he can’t always remember them when he wakes up, and he only gets them once a year or so.” The last one she’d had was about Lord Critic’s fleet bombing her old secondary school building. Fortunately, the town had already been evacuated before she’d dreamed it; it was a ghost town when the bomb actually fell. “Lise is the first dedicant we’ve had in a long time for whom it manifests as these kinds of visions,” she finished.

Eve nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he mumbled. “I’ve had a couple of those dreams, but they were dumb stuff. Like I’d dream an engine would break down, and then it did, and because I’d dreamed it, I knew what the problem was. But I could’ve fixed it anyway; it just made it a little faster.”

Eliza looked up from the tissue resealer. “It’s only happened to me once so far,” she said. “But I’m not 100% sure I’m a soulbonder yet. Miz Joanna, is there a box of sterile self-adhesive gauze underneath the cot next to you?”

Joanna leaned over to check. “Yes,” she reported back. “Do you want the whole box?”

“Just a roll is fine.” Eliza took the gauze from her and began wrapping it around the pilot’s upper arm. “Well, the wound’s closed enough I’m not worried about any further bleeding, but he’s going to lose some of the strength in that arm for a while, maybe permanently, and he needs to not use it at all for a few weeks while the tissue heals under the new skin. It looks like you guys got all of the plastiglass out of him. Once the transfusion’s done, I’m going to give him a once-over to make sure all the smaller cuts and punctures are clean and disinfected, and then I think we should probably let him rest.” She checked the diagnostic machine again. “Okay, Evelyn, it should only be another minute. You doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” Ev said. He sounded tired, which made sense; Joanna hadn’t been up as long as he had, and she was a little sleepy herself. There had been a lot of adrenaline in everyone’s systems. She checked her comlink for the time; it was nearly sunset, and definitely time for a meal, if not a quick nap.

“Who’s in charge of food up here?” Joanna asked, standing up straight and adjusting her hat.

“I run the coffee machine,” Eliza answered as she tucked the adhesive end of the gauze under the last couple of turns. “For meals, usually once a week someone makes a big pot of chili or stew and we freeze the leftovers in individual serving bags. When we’re hungry, we grab one out of the freezer and heat it up. I think we have some of Pup’s two-bean vegetarian chili left, and lots of Sarah’s cabbage-and-tomato mess, and a little bit of the spaghetti and mushrooms I made last week. I try and send someone on a bakery run twice a week for bread, but that would have been this morning.”

“And we didn’t want anyone out on the surface this morning if we could help it,” Joanna sighed. “I’ve had the bean stew Pup calls chili before; it’s not too bad. If you can point me towards the mess hall, I’ll go ahead and warm some up for y’all, too.”

Lise’s bed creaked.

Joanna whirled around. Lise was curled up tight, in a fetal position, and trembling violently enough to sake the whole cot. Out of the corner of her eye, Joanna saw Ev darting out of his chair; she flung up a hand to stop him as Eliza made a wild grab for his unencumbered arm.

“She’s having a seizure!” Ev shouted as Eliza shoved him back into his chair.

“If she is, then on a bed is about the safest place for her,” Eliza reminded him. “But I suspect that’s not exactly it, is it, Miz Joanna?”

Joanna shook her head. “Hush,” she commanded.

Lise uncoiled and sat bolt upright, her eyes staring upwards. “Make no kings, for crowns are poison!” she shouted. Her hands convulsed at her sides, and her voice echoed unnaturally in the small infirmary room, as if it were a gymnasium. “The best of the lot must be brought before the law. The ones with many faces must yield to the many with three faces. Once the gates are thrown open, not even giants can close them. Sign what time and paper bring to avert a tyrant’s curse!” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed on the bed again, a drop of spittle trailing down her jaw.

For a long moment, nobody moved. Joanna finally found her voice. “Please tell me,” she croaked through suddenly-dry lips, “that someone managed to record that!”

Eliza held up a miniature datapad. “Brought this up here to use when we were debriefing the patient,” she stated. “The mike’s not the greatest, but I think I got it on in time.”

“Goddess bless you,” Joanna breathed in relief. “By the stars, that was the worst one I’ve ever seen, and the longest. Hers or otherwise. If we didn’t get it - did y’all understand any of that?”

“Nope,” Eliza said. Ev shook his head silently; his face was nearly blank.

The diagnostic machine beeped. Eliza checked the readings and grinned. “Looks like the transfusion’s done. Is she breathing okay?”

Joanna swept across the isle and pressed a finger to the side of Lise’s neck. “Breathing and heartbeat are both going too dang fast, but yeah, no obstructions or anything,” she reported.

Eliza stepped around the machine and carefully removed the needle from Ev’s arm. “Tell you what,” she said, “let me go warm up something for all of us, since Ev here is going to need something to replace those blood cells and I bet you haven’t eaten since breakfast. I’ll put on a pot of coffee and see if we have any powdered fruit punch left. You two can keep an eye on Lise and the other patient here.” She wrapped a plastihesive strip around Ev’s arm and scuttled for the door.

“Whoa,” Ev whispered.

“No lie there,” Joanna agreed, grabbing a chair and dragging it to the foot of Lise’s cot.

\---

“The problem,” Lord Spoony explained, “is that I’ve never shown up with a ship this size before. I don’t know for sure that they’ll be okay with it.”

“How do you normally get there, then?” Lady Enchik asked. She sounded genuinely curious, despite the habitual irony in her voice.

The _Nimue_ was well underway, heading out of Ultima system at a peculiar angle well out of the planetary orbital plane. Lord Spoony had whispered a set of coordinates to Film Brain, then plopped himself into the chair for the sensor operations station, where he was occasionally fiddling with the controls. Linkara looked as if he still wasn’t sure whether or not to object.

“Honestly,” Lord Spoony replied, “I haven’t been there in a while. The last time I went was to try and buy a cloaking device that would cover Avatar Station itself, and I ended up with the black hole instead. The rationale was that if the cloaking device for the black hole worked, then they’d have enough data to work on one that would cover a planetoid.” He twiddled another dial and then leaned back. “That was about three years ago. I kind of snuck off the station and took one of the hyperspace jitneys. Uncle British had a serious hissy fit after that one.” Lord Spoony looked up with a lopsided grin, eyes sparkling with mischief; Jaeris heard Linkara shuffling nervously behind him. 

Jaeris didn’t blame the Paladin one bit; if he hadn’t been married himself, that grin might have given him some profoundly dirty thoughts, too. 

“So, just so I know who I’m trying to diplomatically charm,” Lady Enchik said, “who exactly are we visiting?”

Lord Spoony’s grin disappeared. “I literally can’t tell you anything about them,” he answered, “except that they’re who I bought the black hole from, I’m about 99% certain they’re who Tig got the first disintegrator beam from, and there’s a pretty good chance the asteroid cannon is either theirs or based on their work.” He glanced around the bridge. “You must have a pretty good AI to run a ship this big with so small a crew, huh?”

“Yes,” Linkara said, looking puzzled by the sudden change in topic. “I programmed the ship’s AI myself.”

Lord Spoony nodded, as if that answered a larger question. Lady Enchik shot them both a perturbed look.

Film Brain broke the awkward silence. “We’re approaching the coordinates you gave,” he announced. “But - there’s nothing there. It’s just a spot in Ultima’s Kupier belt. No planetoids, no comets, nothing but some dust.”

“Technically, there’s an expanding gas bubble roughly centered on this location,” Todd hedged. “But yeah. No station, no planet, no asteroid.”

“There should be a small, dense object,” Lord Spoony said, tapping at his control panel and bringing up a map on the front screen. “Kind of like an escape pod, but with zero velocity relative to the local hyperspace flux.”

Film Brain and Todd shared a confused glance, then turned back to their controls. Jaeris brought up the targeting window on his own console, sweeping for potential targets.

“It’s metal-skinned, right?” Film Brain asked.

“Yeah,” Lord Spoony agreed, “and it should be denser than your average space rock. It should also have a power signature, although it’s a pretty small one.”

“Got it,” Film Brain announced. A speck of green lit up on the screen; Film Brain squinted, and the screen zoomed in on it. The object was roughly cylindrical, with slightly domed end-caps and several antennae in various shapes sticking out of the sides like folded arms.

Lord Spoony turned to Linkara. “I know this is your ship, and Paladin communications protocols and everything, but they don’t know you yet,” he said carefully. “Let me talk first, okay?”

“Go ahead,” Linkara answered, shifting his weight in the captain’s chair.

“Film Brain,” Lord Spoony commanded, “open a channel at radio frequency at 314.15 gigahertz.”

“That’s awfully high -” Film Brain started to object, then caught himself and grimaced. “Channel open,” he finished.

Lord Spoony cleared his throat. “This is Lord Spoony Bard, requesting an audience. Please respond,” he said. He repeated it twice, then fell silent, waiting.

It took a full two minutes before the radio responded. “Good day, Lord Spoony,” it replied, in a high, nasal, scratchy voice that nonetheless struck Jaeris as oddly familiar. “Would you mind telling us why you have a warship on our doorstep, guns bristling?”

“Because it’s the ship I had handy,” Lord Spoony sighed. “You guys know how difficult it is for me to get away. The last two times I had to steal my own shuttle. Look, remember the situation we were talking about the last time I saw you guys?”

The radio picked up some mumbling in the background. “Yes,” the voice replied.

“Well, it’s gotten way worse, and given that I’m pretty sure you guys are partly responsible, we need to figure out what we’re going to do about it,” Lord Spoony sighed. “At the moment, the complement of this ship is six people - me, Lady Critic, the Master of the Arsenal for the Paladin order, the last surviving Shadow Knight, one of the last surviving Gunslingers, and an Omega-level cyborg.”

Film Brain looked startled. “Did we tell him that?” he whispered at Lady Enchik. “I don’t remember anyone telling him that.”

“I didn’t,” she whispered back. “He must have better security scanners than I realized. Now shush.”

“And while I have to admit, now that I’ve said that out loud, that’s a pretty impressive group, it’s not enough to make a war party,” Lord Spoony finished. “I really need to talk to you guys, and I think you might be interested in talking to the Paladin, too.” He shot a faintly worried glance across at Linkara.

The radio picked up more background murmuring. After several minutes of mostly-inaudible conversation, a second voice spoke, less high than the first but still nasal and scratchy. “That ship is too big for the usual transport,” said the second voice. “Do you have a shuttle?”

Lord Spoony turned back to look at Linkara, shrugging. Linkara pursed his lips, then answered, “I think we’d have to bring two - my largest scout-fighter aboard is only really equipped for four. And I’m not sure I’m comfortable leaving my ship here with no one aboard her.”

“Information: This unit is capable of maintaining the ship on its own indefinitely,” Nimue said from the overhead speaker.

Something flickered on the screen. Film Brain’s eyes widened; he announced, “Ship’s sensors are detecting a shield around this whole area. That’s . . . I have no idea how they’re generating something that big, sir.”

“Your ship will be perfectly safe,” the second voice on the radio said. “Lord Spoony, you know how this works. Lead the others. We’ll see you in six minutes, unless it’ll take you longer to scramble your shuttles.”

“That should be fine,” Lord Spoony said. “Lord Bard out.” He gestured at Film Brain to drop the signal.

Linkara stood up and shook out his cape; it looked like he’d been sitting on it wrong. “Jaeris, is it all right if we take my scout and the _Stratocaster_?” he asked. “I don’t think we need all three scout-class ships.”

“I’m fine with that,” Jaeris said, getting to his feet as well. “How do we want to split up?”

“Well, Lord Spoony is the only one who knows how to get there from here,” Linkara replied, “so I’d like to have him with me. How about him, me, and Film Brain on my ship, and you, Todd, and Lady Critic on yours?”

“That’ll actually be a little tight,” Jaeris admitted. “Mine’s really only comfortable for two.”

“We’ll fit,” Lady Enchik decided in a tone that brooked no argument. “Let’s go.”

\---

The cabbage-and-tomato mess was surprisingly tasty, if a little mushy. There was rice in there, and a little bit of ground meat of some sort. It reminded Joanna of the cabbage soup she’d been fed in the winter months as a child, made with fresh vegetables from her grandmother’s garden.

That garden was now part of a desert of dust, one of the many scars left by Lord Critic’s disintegrator beam. The house was gone, the garden, the pasture, the road - all lost to the weapons of war. Joanna forcefully returned her attention to the stew.

Across the room, Ev took his cap off and mopped his brow before returning it. “This is spicier than I expected,” he mumbled to no one in particular.

“Shouldn’t have asked for the chili, then,” Joanna chuckled. Unless Pup had changed the recipe since the last time he’d cooked it at the main base, it really wasn’t all that hot. Someone in Ev’s generation should be able to handle it, unless he was from one of the regions where the local cuisine was astonishingly bland. Then again, Ev’s accent was a little confusing; his lingo suggested he was from the coast, but his pronunciation said he was from the lake country north of here.

“Hey, Ev,” she asked, “where are you from, anyway?”

“Everywhere, pretty much,” Ev answered, waving vaguely. “I don’t know where I was born; my aunt and uncle were taking care of me by the time I can remember, and Uncle Allen moved around a lot. He worked for the government until it got disintegrated.” He poked at something in the bottom of the chili bowl with his spoon, then set it aside.

“Sorry,” Joanna said softly. “Didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

“No worse than anyone else’s,” Ev replied, shrugging. “Aunt Missy is still alive, which means I have one more parent than a lot of the other acolytes.”

“Well, that’s something.” Joanna finished the last of the cabbage stew; it hadn’t quite gotten cold yet.

A curiously deep voice broke the awkward silence with, “Something smells good.”

Ev and Joanna stared at each other, then at the cot next to Ev. The pilot shifted, then sat up; he tried to rub his eyes, but his left hand was caught short by the handcuffs. He was still staring at the cuffs when Ev jumped to his feet.

“I’ll go get Eliza,” Ev blurted, and he ran for the door.

Joanna straightened her hat and coat as she rose from her seat. “Hold on just a sec; we’re fetching our doctor,” she said, hoping that was unnecessary.

The pilot’s eyes grazed the entire infirmary before he looked back to Joanna, taking her in from boots to hat and pausing an extra moment at the gun belt. “Where am I?” he asked, his voice quavering. Something about that voice seemed familiar, but Joanna couldn’t place it.

Ev raced back into the room, hauling Eliza behind him. He apparently hadn’t explained; Eliza was clearly puzzled until she saw the pilot sitting up. “Oh, okay, seriously, why didn’t you just say so?” she hissed at Ev, then trotted back over to the pilot’s cot. She checked his eyes and pulse, then peered at the readout on the diagnostic machine. Once she was satisfied, she propped the datapad up on the side table next to the cot. “Okay, Miz Joanna, we’re recording,” she stated, a little louder than necessary.

“You’re on Mellotron III,” she said, stealing Ev’s seat next to the pilot’s cot and dragging the wooden chair closer to the foot of the bed. “You tried to eject from your fighter and ended up in a tree, pretty banged up. We brought you back here to try and patch you up.”

“As a prisoner,” the pilot said, looking at his left wrist. He didn’t seem either angry or grateful, which puzzled Joanna; she was pretty sure if she woke up in Lord Critic’s infirmary, she’d be one or the other. Maybe both.

“Yup,” Joanna agreed. “Sorry, but we can’t have one of Lord Critic’s flyboys running around unsupervised. Name and rank?”

“DN-80, fighter pilot second class,” the pilot answered.

Joanna frowned. “I asked for your name, soldier, not your serial number.”

The pilot blinked at her. “I told you my name,” he said slowly. “It’s DN-80. What’s yours?”

“I’m Joanna,” she said without thinking. “I’m in charge here.”

The pilot squinted at her. “Sorry,” he said, “I can’t see too well without the visor on. Who else is here?”

“Well, I’m Eliza, and I’m the doctor here, or as close as makes no odds,” Eliza said, removing a wandlike gadget from below the diagnostic machine and pointing it at him. “Look here.” He did, and the device flashed twice, brightly enough to make him flinch. “Hmm,” she murmured, and got up to rummage through one of the drawers.

“And I’m Evelyn,” Ev added from behind Joanna.

“He’s the one who found you,” Joanna informed the pilot. “In fact, he also applied first aid, kept you from falling out of the tree, bandaged you up with the shirt off his back, and gave you a couple pints of blood to replace what you lost. So be polite.”

The pilot tried to focus past Joanna, squinting. “Thanks, stranger,” he said softly. “I guess I owe you.”

“No biggie,” Ev answered.

Joanna opened her mouth to contradict him, then thought better of it. “Okay, so, DN-80, why were you bombing us yesterday?”

“Because General Snob said to,” the pilot said, squinting at her.

“Who’s General Snob?” she asked.

“He’s the commander of Gremlin Station,” said the pilot. “I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you any more than that.”

Joanna sat back in her chair. “I thought Lord Critic was in charge of the station himself,” she said, trying to sound conversational.

“That’s Station Awesome,” the pilot said. “Gremlin Station is the one out by the big gas giant with one ring.”

Joanna raised her eyebrows despite herself. They’d known there was a depot out there, but a full battlestation? “Does that one have the same disintegrator beam Lord Critic’s does?”

“I don’t think so,” said the pilot. “But I’m just a grunt. They don’t tell us very much.”

Eliza came back with a pair of glasses in her hand. “These frames aren’t exactly fashionable,” she apologized, “but this should be fairly close to your prescription.” She pressed them into the pilot’s unencumbered hand.

He put them on and took in the room again. The frames were heavy black plastic and rectangular; they managed to make the pilot’s face look even rounder by comparison. “Okay, yeah, that’s a lot better,” he said, flashing a brilliant smile at Eliza. “Thanks!”

Joanna waved off the interruption. “What was the objective of the bombing run yesterday?” she repeated.

“The primary target was the hydropower station in the valley,” the pilot answered. “Beyond that, we were supposed to take out as many of your gun turrets as we could, which I’m guessing from the way the battle was going when I had to bail out was none.”

“Not a one,” Joanna agreed, trying not to smirk. “Why that particular power station?”

“I have no idea.” The pilot surveyed all three of the faces in front of him, and settled on Ev’s. “Any chance I could get something to eat? I’m starving.”

“Let’s get you something to drink first and see how you react,” Eliza suggested. “You’ve still got some fairly powerful analgesics in your system. Ev, could you get him some water?”

“Right on,” Ev agreed, heading for the door almost before Eliza had finished speaking.

“No idea at all?” Joanna probed. “No greater objective, no plan B, nothing?”

“I think alpha flight was testing some new equipment with the shield generator,” the pilot replied. “But no, they didn’t actually tell me anything about it, or anyone on beta flight, as far as I know.”

Joanna scowled. On the one hand, she knew there were far more efficient ways of getting information out of their captive; on the other hand, she really didn’t want to use them. “They’re not coming back for you, you know,” she said. “Unless you have a transponder on you, they probably don’t even know you’re alive.”

“The transponder’s in the helmet,” the pilot answered. “They most likely figured I was dead when you took it off. But I don’t think they’d come after me anyway; pilots are cheap.”

“What does that even mean?” Ev asked. Joanna nearly jumped; she hadn’t heard him come back in. He passed a plastic tumbler full of ice water over her shoulder; the pilot took it from him and drained it in three gulps.

“It means exactly what I said.” The pilot seemed confused. “They’ll just bring another one out of cold storage to replace me.”

“Your general keeps his pilots in cryostasis?” Eliza asked.

“Well, yeah,” the pilot said, his eyes owlish behind the lenses. “Isn’t that how everyone does it?”

“We don’t,” Joanna stated. “How many does he have?”

“I don’t know,” the pilot said, sounding less sure of himself. “Like I said, I’m number 80 in my particular line.”

Eliza’s features were arranging themselves into an expression somewhere between curiosity and horror. “Line as in gene line?” she asked. “Or product line?”

“Gene line,” the pilot said. “Genetic source DN, clone number 80.” Realization dawned across his broad features. “Are you all originals?”

“As far as I know,” Joanna said. The conversation had gotten away from her. Lord Critic was using clone troops? Wasn’t that a violation of some treaty or other?

“I’m a recombo,” Eliza offered. “Not a direct clone of any particular gene line, but not technically a genetic original either.”

The pilot stared at her. “I didn’t know they could do that,” he whispered. “You’re designer-made.”

“Why does it matter?” Ev burst out. “We’re all still humans! You bleed the same as we do.” He shook his head. “And you deserve a real name instead of just a designation. How about we call you Dan?”

The pilot stared at Ev, then smiled again. “It’s never been a big deal to me,” he said, “but I like it. Okay, call me Dan Eighty. Just Dan for short.”

Joanna pinched the bridge of her nose. “Ev, don’t name the prisoners,” she groaned. “We’re not going to keep him.”

Three heads swiveled on her. “Why not?” cried Ev, Dan, and Eliza in unison.

“Because he’s the enemy!” Joanna half-shouted at them. “I figured we’d pump him for information and then try to trade him back for some concessions or something.”

“Trust me, I’m not worth anything to them,” Dan said with a disconcerting grin. “I’m a cheap clone, easily replaced. Like I said, they almost certainly think I’m dead. Even if they don’t, they think you’ll just execute me if you find me.”

“Why would we do that?” Ev squeaked, cringing.

“Because,” Dan said, shrugging, “I’m the enemy, just like she said. Lord Critic’s forces wouldn’t have bothered saving any of you if our positions were switched, originals or not. I don’t know jack about any of the general’s plans or strategies; I barely know anything about the fighters they programmed me to pilot. If you took me back to the wreck, I couldn’t fix it. I’m pretty much useless to either side right now.” He shifted towards the left railing so he could clasp his hands together.

“We’re not going to kill you!” Ev insisted. His eyebrows jumped behind the shades, and he turned towards Joanna, mouth half-open.

“No, of course we aren’t,” she said before he could say anything more. “I mean, we’ll probably have to lock you up once you’re healed up, but we’re not going to execute anyone. Not even Lord Critic, if we caught him.”

Dan stared at her as if he was having trouble understanding what she’d said. “Of course you can’t kill Lord Critic,” he said, half-stumbling over the words. “That would be regicide. You can’t commit regicide.”

Joanna snorted and crossed her arms across her chest. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” she drawled, exaggerating her accent, “but Mellotron was a republic before Lord Critic showed up. We don’t have a king; we had a Senate, and theoretically we still do. He’s not the Emperor yet. I mean, if he actually gets crowned, then yeah, I’m sure we’ll pledge our fealty. But he ain’t there yet, and disintegrating half our planet isn’t going to suddenly convince us he’s supposed to be Emperor Malachite’s true heir.”

Dan’s eyes were so wide Joanna wondered if it was possible for them to actually fall out. His jaw moved like he was attempting to say something, but he seemed to be struggling to breathe, much less actually speak.

“I think you might have just broken him,” Eliza murmured.

Ev squeezed past Joanna and crouched on the other side of the cot. “Dude,” he said, low and slow, “hey, stay with us here. What’s up?”

“I . . . she . . . you can’t -” Dan swallowed hard and clenched his hands. “You can’t say that about Lord Critic,” he insisted. “He’s the rightful Emperor. Even if somehow he doesn’t win the war of succession, that doesn’t mean it’s not his by right.”

Joanna shrugged. “I can’t say I understand the rules of succession, and I can’t say I care, either,” she said. “Until someone’s actually seated on the Chrome Throne at Vidya, it makes no nevermind to us out here. I could see putting down a rebellion if he’d been crowned and we’d refused to acknowledge his rule or something, but he showed up here, demanded an unconditional surrender, and then started blasting before the Senate could even take a vote.”

“But he’s the Emperor,” Dan said. His voice sounded hollow, like he was repeating something he’d heard a thousand times.

“Not yet,” Eliza repeated. “There’s no law saying that anyone has to follow someone who isn’t the Emperor yet unless they’re your liege-lord, and we don’t have those here. Haven’t since before Emperor Malachite’s death.”

Dan’s lip trembled. “How does that even work?” he asked, his voice rising.

Ev leaned towards Joanna. “Is that really how it works on other planets, or is he just seriously brainwashed?” he whispered.

“I honestly don’t know,” Joanna whispered back. “I mean, the only times I’ve been offworld have been to free stations and Tektopia Prime, and it doesn’t work like that there, but then, that’s probably why Lord Critic took out the Tektopia worlds first.”

“Why are y’all whispering?” Lise complained behind them.

Joanna spun towards the prisoner so fast she almost lost her hat. “Hold that thought a few minutes,” she said, then dashed across the isle. “Lise! Are you okay?” she shouted.

“I think so,” Lise groaned. “I feel like someone reamed out my brain with a wire brush, but nothing physical hurts.” She rubbed at her temples with both hands. “What happened? The last thing I remember is some kid in an orange ball cap driving us up to the main turret.”

Ev whistled. “That’d be me, ma’am,” he said. “And that means you’ve lost about twelve or thirteen hours.”

“Holy freaking crap,” Lise moaned. “Any idea why?”

“You got blindsided by a major prophesy,” Joanna explained. “Although that sounds like you lost some time before it hit; you were kind of zoning out on me on the way to the turret, but when I ran up to the main one and sent you up here, you were still lucid.”

“You didn’t get hit with the vision until halfway up the mountain,” Ev added.

Dan’s mouth hung open. “What are you guys talking about?” he asked, gobsmacked.

Joanna turned back to Eliza. “Can you play the previous recording without stopping this one?” she asked.

“I think so,” Eliza replied. “Give me a second.” She brought up the interface on the datapad and adjusted two sliders.

The recording of the prophesy sounded thin and tinny through the datapad’s single speaker, much less impressive than it had in person, but it still retained a sense of supernatural urgency and a trace of that unnatural echo. Joanna watched closely as Lise listened, bewildered, to her own voice.

“I don’t remember any of that,” she whispered to Joanna when it had finished. 

Ev shook his head. “You were way out in Tranceville, population: you,” he said. “You got hit with it halfway up the mountain. You did’t spill it until a little less than an hour ago.”

Lise clutched at her hair; at some point during the process, her braid had come loose. “I don’t even remember the imagery that must have gone with that,” she wailed. “That’s not - what good is a prophesy if it’s all in riddles, with no hints at all?”

“I’m not sure it was for us,” Joanna mused. “I think I’m gonna have to get that to Jaeris. And to do that, I’m gonna need to transcribe it, because talking through a soulbond long enough to get all that across is not something that happens. It’s gonna have to be an image.”

“Holy shitballs, that was real,” Dan breathed.

Joanna and Ev both turned to face him. “Well, yeah, of course it was real,” Joanna said, puzzled.

“No, I mean, there’s no reason I should believe any of that,” Dan continued. “I should believe that every moment of that was faked to convince me. But - I don’t.” He shivered. “You all believe in prophesy. You believe in soulbonding. And something about that - I don’t know why, but I think I believe that was a real prophesy, too, whatever that means.”

Joanna searched the cot-side trays with her eyes. “Hey, Eliza,” she called, “I hate to make a mess, but can you toss that spoon somewhere?”

“Sure,” Eliza replied, and threw the spoon carelessly over her shoulder.

Joanna whipped out her soulblaster and fired from the hip; the spoon turned into a splatter of cheap molten steel against the far wall.

Dan’s eyes were about to pop out of his head again. Joanna allowed herself a chuckle and dropped the blaster back into its holster. “Well, I can’t prove the prophesy or the soulbond to you,” she said with a smirk, “but I can sure show you the results of the perfect aim meditation. How’s that for real?”

“Show me more,” Dan begged, gathering his legs under him. “I don’t know if I can yet, but I think I want to believe.”

\---

“Information: all scout ship airlocks sealed. Evacuation of landing bay commencing in three, two, one, evacuation initiated.” The ship’s voice carried over her own internal speakers and over the _Stratocaster_ ’s radio; the former was nearly drowned out by the squeal of outrushing air.

“External pressure dropping,” Film Brain’s voice declared from the fighter’s radio. “We should be clear for ion thrusters in ten seconds.”

“Let’s go,” Todd hollered from the galley seat. “You weren’t kidding about how cramped this thing is.”

“I said I’d be happy to switch with you,” Lady Enchik called back. “I’m shorter; I’ll probably fit better.”

Todd grunted, then replied, “And if we have to do any diplomacy before we land, you need to be where the broadcaster is. Just get this over with, okay?”

“Read you loud and clear,” Jaeris said, opening the throttle slowly. The _Stratocaster_ rose from the fighter bay floor on two columns of ion plasma and veered gracefully upwards, towards the retractable roof. He took the ship on a quick orbit around the _Nimue_ , both to make sure all the controls were functional and to give Linkara’s scout ship time to clear the bay doors.

Linkara was taking the scout that resided on the _Nimue_ , not the fighter he’d brought from the planet; this one had a name, the _Vigilant_ , and Jaeris was pretty sure it could have handled all six of them. Why Linkara had insisted on splitting them up, Jaeris wasn’t sure; he’d have guessed it was to get some time alone with Lord Spoony, except they had Film Brain with them.

“I hope our cyborg buddy doesn’t mind being used as an impromptu chaperone,” Jaeris laughed to himself.

“Oh, by all the stars and powers,” Lady Enchik griped, raising her hands to her head. “If I had known that was going to happen, I’d have risked trying to get to Spoony via high-frequency radio, and damn the snoopers.”

“Yeah, that makes things more awkward between you and Lord Spoony, doesn’t it?” Todd added.

“No shit,” Lady Enchik agreed. “I mean, you and me, and Nella and me, that’s complicated enough. Now there’s another hinge to the Y.”

“At least you’d both have outside lovers,” Todd pointed out. “I mean, if you want them.”

Lady Enchik ran both hands down her face and growled. “Yeah, it makes it more equal, and once Spoony’s actually crowned Emperor it won’t matter much,” she argued, “but it’s against Linkara’s order’s rules completely, it’s not exactly bagatelle for your order, banging a cyborg is socially questionable at the best of times, Spoony doesn’t need charges of decadence while we’re trying to solidify the succession, and poor Bu-, I mean, Film Brain technically doesn’t have a heart anymore but this has got to be awful for him, too.”

The graceful crescent of the _Vindicator_ cleared the bay doors and arced towards the irregular cylinder hanging in empty space. Jaeris nudged the controls to follow at docking speed. “I’m not sure I followed that last one,” he said, thanking his lucky stars again that he was already soulbonded. If nothing else, it reduced drama.

As if in response to the thought, the soul blaster throbbed at his side. Something had just happened, but he had no sense of what. He closed his eyes for just a second and dropped his hand to the hilt.

_Worry, pride, concern, determination._

Well, Joanna didn’t seem to be in immediate danger; there was no fear in the bond, and no anger, either. He’d have to try and check in later, though. Concern strong enough to catch his attention meant something serious had gone down back home.

He opened his eyes to find Lady Critic observing him minutely. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Needed to check in.”

“With the gun?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“With my wife,” Jaeris explained. “She and I are soulbonded, and then our bond is fused to the soul blasters. It’s - never mind, it’s complicated. I just felt something from it and needed to make sure she wasn’t in trouble.”

Lady Enchik’s eyebrow stayed arched, but she nodded and went back to the conversation. “When he was properly alive, at least, Film Brain had the tendency encouraged in the Nostalgian servant class to fall passionately in love with one’s liege-lord.”

“And by ‘encouraged,’ she means ‘programmed from birth via social engineering’,” Todd added. “Although even by their standards, Buck had it pretty bad.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Lady Enchik objected. “In the general case, I mean. I don’t disagree about Film Brain.”

Jaeris nodded; he’d gotten a taste of that when he’d first taken a look at the state of Film Brain’s soul. “And you think that wasn’t special between him and Lord Critic, that he’ll just develop the same feelings at the same intensity for Sir Linkara now that his allegiance has formally been changed?”

Lady Enchik watched the _Vindicator_ swoop around the cylindrical probe. “It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that it might be specific to Tig,” she admitted.

“That’s dumb,” Todd called out. “You know it’s special between you and Nella; why would it be different for them?”

“I don’t actually know that,” Lady Enchik said, much softer than before. “I hope it’s true, but I don’t have any way of proving it.”

Before Todd or Jaeris could say anything more, the high, scratchy voice from before ordered from the radio, “Stay back from the probe and wait for our signal.”

“Waiting,” Jaeris and Linkara replied over each other.

One of the antennae folded at the side of the cylinder swung wide, until it was a a right angle to the side of the probe and extended to nearly twice its length. Something golden and shiny appeared at the end of the antenna and spun outward, like the line from a fishing reel. Jaeris squinted, but he saw nothing resembling a hook on the end.

The golden thread spooled out until a strand half the length of the _Nimue_ trailed from the probe. What happened next was confusing; it looked as if the center was unravelling for a moment. Jaeris realized belatedly that it was a double strand, and the two strands were separating - no, it was a loop, doubled back on itself, and now it was expanding into a circular hoop. The hoop grew, grew rounder, went tight, went rigid - and suddenly it was filled with a rippling field of energy.

“You may proceed,” the radio announced.

For a moment, the _Vindicator_ hung motionless, then it wheeled almost in place and dove for the center of the energy field.

It failed to reappear on the other side. Jaeris was acutely aware that this should have surprised him, and did not.

“Not shadow-space, I’m guessing?” Jaeris called backwards to the galley.

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Todd agreed, “but I won’t know for sure until we’re into it.”

“Figured,” Jaeris grunted, and eased the _Stratocaster_ into an arc that replicated Linkara’s path as closely as he could. The energy field slid around the ship like a beaded curtain.

\---

Lise stared glumly at Eliza’s notebook. “I just wish I understood any of this,” she muttered at the penciled lettering. “It doesn’t even feel familiar.”

“We don’t have to understand it to transcribe it,” Eliza replied. She set down the pencil and swiped at the datapad to rewind it.

“ ‘Sign what time and paper bring’,” Ev chanted along under his breath. “I’m guessing Lord Critic is the tyrant, but what’s his curse?”

“The disintegrator beam, maybe?” Joanna hazarded a guess.

“The beams themselves wouldn’t be a curse from Lord Critic’s perspective,” Dan objected. “Their power requirements might be, but I don’t know how ‘time and paper’ would affect that, either in my lord’s favor or in yours.”

Ev’s lip trembled for a second. “He doesn’t have to be your lord, dude,” he urged. “You already said he’s given you up for dead. You’re free, man.”

“Hello, I’m a clone,” Dan replied bitterly. “I’m barely a legal person.”

“Oh, come on!” Joanna exploded. “I know Lord Critic’s legal skills suck, but surely they can’t suck that much.”

“That’s not just him,” Dan said, cringing slightly. “That’s the law of Nostalgia system. I thought only the decadent Tektopia worlds were any different.”

“Nope,” Eliza answered before Joanna could start spitting nails. “I’m sort of a clone, or at least a constructed person, and I can work and learn and vote here, same as everyone else.”

Dan sat back on the cot, half-leaning against the wall. “So wild, so free, so far from me,” he whispered.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Ev urged. “Just - you can join us, as a friend, and forget the old memory.”

“Why do you think he would even want to do that?” Eliza asked. “Okay, Miz Joanna, here’s the whole thing written out.”

“Because having to serve Lord Critic seems like a major drag,” Ev shouted. “You don’t even get to party or hang out between flights! You get kept in cryostasis and dragged out when they need a pilot, then put back in the fridge. That’s not - it’s not cool, man.”

“It never even occurred to me to think about it,” Dan confessed. “It was my purpose. It was what I was incubated for. But yeah, even if I managed to escape, I’d have to steal a fighter to get back there, and the general said your last one left a few days ago.”

“It’s technically not the last one,” Joanna admitted, “but it’s probably the last one that’s immediately spaceworthy.”

Dan flinched. “I have no desire to suck vacuum,” he admitted. “And - they told us all the psi stuff was fake. That’s one of the justifications for conquering Mellotron before some of the more strategic systems, like Jakul or Abaddon; it’s to keep the fakery from spreading.” He swallowed. “And now I don’t know whether I think that’s true, anymore. And if they lied to us about that, what else did they lie about?”

“All kinds of stuff, I’ll bet,” Joanna muttered. “Okay, the problem with this page is I don’t think I can look at the whole page at once. I need - if I’m going to get this to Jaeris, it needs to be one big image in my head. I can’t be reading it, because that takes time, and even at our best, I’d have to be touching him for that. How can we get one big image?”

“How about if I hold it over here?” Eliza asked, taking the notebook back and holding it out at arm’s length.

“Too small,” Joanna answered. “I can see the whole thing, but I can’t make out all the words.”

Ev chewed on his lip for a moment, then looked up. “There’s maintenance supplies at this base, right?” he asked.

“Lots of parts,” Eliza agreed. “Not enough to build anything big out of, though.”

“What about paint?” Ev continued.

Eliza looked towards the ceiling, her eyes darting back and forth behind her shades. “There’s the drab green paint we use for surface vehicle camouflage,” she said after a long pause. “I think we have a can and a half of that in the garage.”

Ev grinned. “Then if we can scrounge up at least one paintbrush, and I can borrow your pencil, we can make it big enough,” he crowed, pointing at the blank yellow wall of the infirmary.

\---

The stars on the other side of the energy field were completely different.

Jaeris’s first thought was that the field had changed their orientation, but no, no part of the starry expanse of space he was currently facing matched the star chart still displayed on his control panel. They were somewhere else entirely, somewhere that didn’t match any of the saved star charts in the navigation computer. Jaeris told it to try and recalculate where they were by extrapolating from the charts and the current hyperspace flux conditions, but that was going to take a while.

The hull of the ship sang with a deep, resonant note, as if someone had turned its metal skin into a gong and struck it. A pale violet light flooded across the front windshield.

“Please turn off your ion engines,” the deeper scratchy voice said from the radio with startling clarity. “We will tow you to an appropriate distance from our station and then teleport you in all at once.”

“That’s a hell of a tractor beam,” Jaeris said as the _Stratocaster_ lurched into motion, moving straight up. “It’s got some serious control on it.” It felt more like an express elevator than any tractor beam he’d ever been in. He set the engines to standby mode; he wasn’t sure how quickly they were going to have to leave.

“It’s a hell of a station,” Todd said reverently from behind him. 

Jaeris looked up and yelped.

The station that swam into view above them was easily ten times the surface area of either Palladium or Avatar. It would have qualified as a dwarf planet in orbit around a sun, or a sizable moon orbiting a planet. The spheroidal structure had clearly been built up in layers, with patches added on and then built over, expanded, and added onto again. Most of its surface was made of a peculiarly dark metal, but it absolutely bristled with projections, some clearly antennae, some obviously weapons, most with no immediately discernible purpose whatsoever.

“Was that whole thing cloaked?” Jaeris asked, swallowing hard.

“Yup.” Lady Enchik looked more curious than impressed.

“Where does the computer say the nearest star is?” Todd asked cautiously.

Jaeris glanced at the navigation console again. “About three light-years that way,” he answered, pointing off to his left.

“Then Lord Spoony’s right,” Todd concluded. “They must have some serious solutions to the power problem. Think how much energy it must take to keep something like that not just operational, but habitable and cloaked.”

Jaeris looked at it again, and his head swam. He had no idea at all how much energy that would take, other than that it was far more than any power plant he’d ever seen could manage.

The _Stratocaster_ came to an amazingly smooth stop a few meters from the surface of the megastation. The _Vindicator_ sank gently into view about fifty meters to their right a handful of seconds later; it must have been farther away from the tractor beam generator to start with.

“Secure anything that needs securing,” ordered the radio. “Teleport in ten, nine, eight . . .”

Jaeris made sure he had all his personal gear stowed in his jacket, unbuckled his seat, and rose to his feet. Lady Critic was already standing, hands clasped in front of her.

“. . . Two, one, initiate!” An unfamiliar teleporter effect washed over Jaeris, looking like spinning motes of brilliant blue light, and then the cramped cockpit of the ship was replaced by a room the size of an entire factory, all brushed steel surfaces and bright sterile lighting. Todd stumbled behind them; it sounded like he hadn’t quite gotten to his feet when the teleportation field hit.

Jaeris’s initial impression was that the room was nearly empty except for them. Then the teleporter afterimages and tones cleared out of his eyes and ears, and he realized that he was absolutely wrong. If anything, the room was crowded, although oddly quiet for the number of people in it.

The space they were in was a vast rectangular prism four or five stories tall, at least fifty meters long if not longer, and about two thirds as wide as it was long. Walkways ran along the walls at regular vertical intervals, and three or four catwalks crossed above them at each level. Their party stood at more or less the center of one of the short walls, and the inhabitants of the megastation were giving them a fairly wide berth, but the walkways, catwalks, and floor teemed with men in lab coats carrying equipment, checking datapads, monitoring panels in the walls, directing cargo, and in two cases simply standing and staring into midair.

The room was teeming with people, like a shopping arcade on a holiday. Why did it seem so empty? And why was every person Jaeris could see male?

Lady Enchik made a sound like a startled mouse; her hand darted to her lips.

Cyborgs, Jaeris realized. Every single one of them had replacement eyes. Some of them had devices that looked like jeweler’s loupes, some had what were clearly microscope or telescope eyepieces permanently installed, others had huge lenses with protective coatings that made them look faintly insectoid. A very small number also had electromechanical replacements for one hand; none that Jaeris could see had replaced both. Otherwise, they looked perfectly human; they didn’t have the underskin circuitry that gave Film Brain’s half-electronic nature away in this cold light, at least not where it could be seen.

A pair of them detached from the milling swarm and walked towards the traveling party. Both of these wore the bug-eyed lenses; the reflective coating made them look as if they had holographic spirals where their irises and pupils should have been. One was taller, with lanky arms and legs, just a hint of a developing paunch in the middle, shoulder-length dark hair, and a prominent nose, wearing light green surgical scrubs under a spotless white lab coat. The other one was just a bit over average height, with lighter brown hair fairly closely cut, a heavier frame, and a broad jaw; he wore black scrubs under a belted grey lab coat that, while clean, looked like it had been washed a few too many times.

“What the hell?” Linkara whispered, goggling wide-eyed at the approaching scientists.

Lord Spoony turned and put a hand on Linkara’s shoulder, just below the epaulet. “Don’t freak out,” he warned.

Jaeris looked at the two of them, then at the two men in the lab coats, then at the rest of the room, trying desperately not to look like he was staring.

He hadn’t been wrong, after all. There _were_ only two other people in the room outside of their party. There were just a lot of them.

Every single person in the room was a reflection of these two, just at different points in their lifetimes. The youngest were youths, past puberty but not yet settled into their adult shapes, gangly and half-swallowed by their lab coats. The majority looked to be in their primes, around their late twenties and thirties. The next largest group were mature but still vibrant, the tall ones going magnificently salt-and-pepper, the shorter ones balding with dignity. A few elderly men tottered among the rest on brass canes or wheeled along on compact electronic carts. But every single one of them wore one of exactly two sets of features, modified only by age, the different eye implants, and an occasional scar.

And Lord Spoony and Linkara wore the same faces, too.

The (fragment of the) man in the grey lab coat walked directly up to Linkara and looked him straight in the eye. He was a little older, perhaps by five years, thinner of hair and a little thicker around the middle, but the similarity - no, the congruence - was impossible to miss.

“Welcome home,” he said, in the scratchy, nasal voice that - now that the radio no longer distorted it - was also bizarrely similar to Linkara’s.

The Paladin made a strangled screeching noise at the back of his throat and took a swing at him.

“Whoa, hey, cut it out!” Lord Spoony cried; he was forced to let go of Linkara to duck the next wild swing. His counterpart, whose only visible differences from him were the eye implants and slightly longer hair, frowned.

“It’s not possible!” Linkara screamed; his voice echoed off the metal walls. “I’m me! I’m not a copy!” He shoved the man in the grey lab coat away and turned as if to run, grazing his shoulder on the wall behind him.

“Linkara!” Jaeris called after him. “Stop it! You don’t have anywhere to go!”

Linkara’s cape flared as he wheeled towards Jaeris. He was nearly chalk-white except for two spots of livid rage in his cheeks. “They stole my face!” he roared. “They can’t do that! They have to pay!” He reached for his blaster, turning so his back was to the wall and Jaeris was at his flank.

Jaeris swallowed and flexed his hand towards his own soul blaster. He wasn’t sure what Linkara’s could do, but if the Paladin started shooting, he was going to have to stop him somehow.

A crashing chord swelled off to Jaeris’s left. The room was too brightly lit to have much in the way of deep shadows, but what was there gathered itself into a curtain and fell over Linkara as the chord evolved into a fugue. Forced to the floor, Linkara struggled for a moment, then stopped, blaster in hand but not yet fired.

“Thanks, Todd,” Jaeris whispered as he shifted around to face Linkara directly.

“No problem,” Todd answered in a whisper, his right hand still wandering up and down the keys of his legendary instrument. “Until he gets his head together enough to remember it’s an illusion or loses it enough to actually start shooting, I think it’ll hold him.”

Lord Spoony strode over, head held high. “I know, Linkara,” he said rapidly. “I know how much of a shock it is; I’ve been through it. It’s okay, though. It’ll pass. Nothing you see here changes anything about the rest of your life, about anything you’ve ever done or said.”

Linkara shook his head loose from the blanket of illusory shadows. “It means my parents were lying to me, for one,” he spat.

The man in the grey lab coat frowned, his brow furrowing. “Did they not tell you that you were adopted?” he said with audible concern.

“No, they did not,” Linkara forced out between gritted teeth.

His counterpart sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him, with only Todd’s illusionary net of shadow between them. He was at point-blank range for the soul blaster, if Linkara did start firing; Jaeris wondered if he understood how fragile that barrier actually was. “And you never suspected?” the scientist wondered.

Linkara’s shoulders slumped. “Not exactly,” he allowed. “My brother and I don’t look anything alike, and he looks like he could be a clone of Papa. I did wonder once or twice if possibly my mother had - had committed some indiscretion, and I’d been sired by some other man, but I look enough like her, I never imagined that I might not be her natural child.”

“If it’s any consolation,” the scientist in the white lab coat stated, “I’m pretty sure you’re LN-19, and that clone was placed with a couple from my brother’s original family line on the distaff side. So, you actually are related to your mother. And it’s quite possible that your brother actually is a clone of your father; our genelab had done some work for them before.” He snorted. “I’m a little surprised they didn’t name you something further from your original designation, to be honest.”

The flush of rage had drained from Linkara’s face as the scientist was speaking, leaving him on the greenish side of pale; he looked like he was about to pass out completely. “I don’t understand,” he choked out.

Lord Spoony pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Not helping, man, seriously. Can we start over?”

“Why don’t we begin with some actual introductions?” Lady Critic suggested dryly. “And Todd, I think he’s okay; you can stop now.”

“He doesn’t look anywhere remotely close to okay to me, but if you say so.” Todd looked skeptical, but he brought the fugue to a resolution on the same chord he’d started from and slung the keytar under his cloak again. The blanket of darkness fled back to its individual shadows.

Lord Spoony extended a hand to Linkara, but the paladin just looked at it blankly. Sighing, Lord Spoony turned to Lady Critic instead. “Lady Critic of Nostalgia, may I present Doctors Innis Sano and Lincoln Sano.” 

The dark-haired scientist sketched a bow, and the grey-clad one followed. “We generally go by the nicknames Inn and Link,” the first Doctor Sano explained.

Gesturing at each member of the party in turn, Lord Spoony continued, “Doctor Inn Sano, Doctor Link Sano, may I present Sir Linkara of Zord, Sir Todd of Twilight, Jaeris of Mellotron, and Film Brain.”

Inn Sano inspected Film Brain cautiously; the harsh lighting made his cyborg circuitry obvious beneath his skin. “You’re the missing Omega,” he whispered. “We’ve been looking for you for the better part of two years.”

Film Brain recoiled, flattening himself against the wall behind him. “How could you possibly know that?” he demanded.

“We built you,” Inn Sano replied. “You can’t get an Omega built without coming either to us or to one of the other Omegas, and most of them just don’t have a stomach for surgery.”

Todd nodded towards Lady Enchik. “Have you been here before, then?” he muttered.

“No, I haven’t,” Lady Enchik shot back. “When Nella fell off the ladder, I had her put in emergency cryostasis and then went to Abaddon Station, if you really have to know.”

Todd let out a sharp hiss. “Sage Omega? You went to Sage to have her borged?”

“I didn’t know I had a choice,” Lady Enchik snapped. “He was the only one I knew I could go to who Tig didn’t have any leverage on.”

Link Sano smiled beatifically. “Sage Omega was one of our first ones,” he said. “We didn’t know yet how far the Omegas could outstrip their original programming.”

Lady Enchik shook her head, nearly shaking the ribbons from her topknots. “I’m not as concerned about that,” she informend them, “as that apparently Tig and Spoony both know about you, and I don’t.”

“Well,” Inn Sano answered, “I assume you can see why Lord Bard knew about us.”

“Actually, I don’t,” she replied, “since it’s obvious that Linkara didn’t. I mean, I can see that you and Spoony are the same geneline, and since there are older clones of the same line here, I’m guessing neither of you is the original. But why would some of your clones know and some not?”

Inn Sano glanced at both Todd and Jaeris; watching the spirals change their focus was disconcerting, even moreso than figuring out where Todd was looking under the veil. “Anyone want to take a crack at that before I explain?” he asked.

“No clue,” Todd said, folding his arms.

Jaeris wondered briefly whether he should do the same. If the Sanos were testing him, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to let them know how close to passing he was. On the other hand, they seemed to already know quite a bit about their party, either from Lord Spoony or otherwise. “There’s really only two of you,” he said cautiously.

“Well, we can see that,” Film Brain interrupted.

“You can see that there are only two sets of genes here,” Jaeris agreed, “but that’s not what I meant. There are only eight souls in the room.” That was technically a lie, but if the Sanos didn’t already know there was a whole soul in Linkara’s blaster, he was pretty sure he didn’t want to be the one who told them.

Film Brain’s eyebrows nearly leapt off his face. “In the whole room?” he asked, his voice rising sharply.

“Very good,” Inn Sano chuckled. He tilted his head slightly; when he next spoke, half of the entire room spoke with him in perfect unison, a thunderous choir of high, nasal voices. “There is only one Inn Sano.”

“And one Link Sano,” continued the one in front of them. “But the process doesn’t work on every clone.”

“You soulbond the clones before they - before they wake up, or whatever it is you do to activate them,” Jaeris realized aloud. “Each of you only has a piece of that one soul in you.”

“Very good!” Link Sano smiled at him like a teacher smiles at a prize pupil. “We’ll have to get a gene sample from you before you leave. But for a few of the clones, they somehow acquire a whole soul of their own instead of a spark of ours. It would be wrong to kill them and start over at that point, since they’re beings separate from us, so we typically foster them out under assumed names. It doesn’t happen all that often, and we try to spread them out as much as possible.”

“In Lord Spoony’s case,” Inn Sano continued, “we got very, very lucky. Lord British’s brother-in-law’s son, at the time Lord Bard, had been through three wives and a mistress without conceiving an heir, even a bastard one. We contacted the third wife and told her we had a healthy male infant of Teknocratic stock, from a line prone to soulbonding. She agreed, and talked Lord Bard into it, and so when he died in a tragic dueling mishap, we had one of our geneline in line for the Imperial throne.”

“And that’s the other reason I think trying to make me Emperor is a seriously bad idea,” Lord Spoony jumped in, pleading with Lady Critic. “I literally can’t talk about the Sano Brothers unless there’s one of them in the room with me; that’s one reason why I dragged you out here. They installed some trap doors in my head before they adopted me out, and I don’t know how many of them there are, or what all the triggers are. It might be them as the power behind the throne instead of you, and that scares the shit out of me.”

Both Sanos looked startled. “Are we seriously down to you?” Inn Sano gasped. “How bad has it gotten out there?”

“Not down to me yet,” Lord Spoony explained, “but Lady Critic has proposed a diplomatic alliance, and -”

“And the Bard, British, and Critic claims together would beat the Nerd Emperor’s,” Link Sano concluded. “How interesting!”

Inn Sano steepled his fingers. “And while I would like to reassure you that your fears are baseless, that would not be entirely honest. While I cannot take you back and make you part of me, you are correct that there are trap doors, as you call them, that you have not yet encountered.”

“Mostly because you’ve never tried to attack us,” Link Sano added. A fraction of a second later, he was on his back on the floor, flailing; Linkara was sitting on his chest with his hands around Link Sano’s neck.

“And me?” Linkara snarled. “What booby traps have you left in my brain?”

“Not enough, clearly,” Inn Sano grumbled from several throats. The crowd surged quietly forward like the tides; Jaeris’s vision went slightly blurry as Link Sano plucked Linkara off of himself with a dozen hands, like a giant flicking off a biting fly.

Jaeris closed his eyes tight and listened with his inner ear. It wasn’t just that all the bodies of Link Sano shared sparks of the same soul; they really were one single, giant organism. They didn’t just share one soul. They shared one mind.

That was scary. That went beyond any soulbonding our soul-touching Jaeris knew; that was mindbonding. That had been illegal since the days of Emperor Vyce.

He opened his eyes and looked at what he now understood was a single limb of Link Sano with fresh respect and a certain amount of fear. Linkara was being held by two of the younger limbs, still struggling.

“To answer your question,” Link Sano replied through his previous mouthpiece, “you only have one. For all practical purposes, you’re bugged. We can track your particular soul across the galaxy, and if necessary, we can see through your eyes and hear through your ears. However, the energy costs in time and attention are quite steep.”

“The Paladin training,” Linkara gasped. “You saw it all. Nothing is oathbound anymore.” He struggled against the two bodies that pinned him and failed to escape.

“Actually, that’s not true, either,” Link Sano told him. “We knew one of our children had gone to Zord, but to be frank, we had other things on our minds.” He smirked. “After all, we know more about soulbonding than any Paladin has ever cared to learn. Do you have the other Paladin talents, too?”

“Yes,” Linkara said warily, “but I’m not particularly good at them.”

“Any other peculiar abilities?” Inn Sano asked.

“No,” Linkara growled. He tried and failed to elbow the Link Sano clone holding his right arm.

Lord Spoony raised an eyebrow. “He’s got an AI in his warship that you guys would be proud of,” he said.

Linkara stopped struggling as his jaw dropped. “Two,” he said quietly. “I built two AIs that spontaneously generated souls. I didn’t mean to; it just happened.”

“Souls of their own, not just sparks of his,” Jaeris qualified. “I’ve seen them.”

“One of which is an exceptionally kind and competent person in her own right,” Film Brain added. “I haven’t really met the other one yet.”

Link Sano giggled and clasped his hands. “Oh, that’s astonishing!” he squealed. “Even we haven’t managed that! How did you - wait, you already said it just happened. Well, the next time it happens, pay close attention and let us know how you did it.”

“Fat chance,” Linkara mumbled.

Lady Critic cleared her throat. “This is all fascinating,” she stated, “but it has exactly nothing to do with why we came here. We were talking about the succession problem.”

“Right,” Lord Spoony agreed, shooting a sympathetic glance at Linkara before turning back to the two mouthpiece Sanos. “So, first of all, Lord Critic’s disintegrator cannons - those are from you guys, right?”

“The first one was,” Inn Sano answered. A crease appeared in his forehead just above the bug-eye lenses; the rest of his expression didn’t change.

“Someone he hired reverse engineered it to build the second one,” Link Sano continued. “Which, I’ll admit, if we’d known that was possible I don’t think we’d have sold it at all.”

“How does he know about you?” Lady Critic demanded.

“We aren’t confined to this station,” Inn Sano replied. “We have a local face on most free stations; generally speaking, we try to avoid planets, but there are exceptions. General Phelous was contracting with us to construct more compact mobile shield generators, and Lord Critic invited himself along. He proposed creating a planetary attack weapon, purely as a deterrent measure against the Nerd Pretender, and we began spitballing, and one thing led to another.” He shifted his shoulders and glanced at his shoes. “We didn’t realize he was going to use them at targets other than the Nerd Pretender first. We certainly didn’t realize he was going to build a second one.”

“And the Nerd Emperor’s meteor cannon?” Todd said, in a preternaturally calm voice.

Link Sano shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “For that, we owe you a personal apology,” he admitted. “It was supposed to be a defensive weapon. It’s mounted on a moon of Vidya II; the power requirements are unimaginably huge. It lofts those things at a significant fraction of the speed of light.”

Film Brain squinted hard at them. “How could it hit a target on Penumbra from Vidya? They’re halfway across the quadrant from each other!”

Linkara had finally stopped struggling. “Or on Zord?” he asked.

“What happened at Zord?” Inn Sano interrupted.

“One of the Nerd Emperor’s big rocks got thrown at Zord, and its auto-defenses had been hacked to only attack ships, not natural objects, even ones moving at unnatural speeds,” Todd filled in. “He tried to do to them what was done to us.”

“Did you get a decent trace on its path prior to entering the inner system in either case?” Link Sano asked.

Film Brain ran a hand through his hair. A monochrome projection of Zord system, showing the defense systems, the planets, and the star, appeared in light blue in front of him; the asteroid’s trail appeared in a brighter blue and tracked its path until the grid shot it down. The projection even had a timecode in one corner.

Link Sano pointed to the initial point of the asteroid’s path. “There. Is there any data on the asteroid prior to that point?”

“That’s where the system I was connected to first noticed it,” Film Brain said.

Inn Sano grabbed at his hair. “Data, we need that data! Paladin Linkara, I realize asking for a download from your cyborg assistant is an immense security breach from your perspective, and you have negative reason to trust us, but if you’re asking for our help in defending the system, we’ve got to have it.”

Linkara cringed. “I understand,” he said, “but our security system is an immense priority -”

“Not that,” Link Sano interrupted. “We designed your entire drone system. Didn’t build it, but the blueprints are from us.” He snagged a datapad from a passing Inn Sano and began typing with two fingers; when he flipped it around, it displayed the schematic for the buckyball of laser repulsors around Zord.

Linkara’s mouth fell open. “You could have just scanned the system,” he protested weakly. “That proves nothing.”

“Look closer,” Link Sano argued. “Like I said, we designed it, but we didn’t build it.”

“And this is the version with a repulsor generator at exact solar north,” Linkara realized aloud. “We built it with an open space centered there instead. I remember these plans; I hadn’t been admitted to the council yet, but I was on the financial committee. I thought they were Tektopian, though.”

“They were contracted through my face on Tektopia IV, yes,” Inn Sano replied. “And, strictly speaking, when we had legal citizenships, we were Tektopians, although legally we’re dead now. Makes us harder to trace.”

“Most of the faces have local legal identities,” Link Sano added to clarify.

“So is there anything you aren’t responsible for?” Lady Critic wondered.

“Lord Critic’s battle platforms,” Link Sano replied. “That’s 100% old designs from Emperor Malachite’s navy, or at least the unmodified one is. We never sold Emperor Malachite any of our tech; we didn’t want him noticing us at all.”

“The vast majority of non-Omega cyborgs have nothing to do with us,” Inn Sano listed.

“We’ve never sold anything to Dread Lord Sterling,” Link Sano continued. “If the death ray he’s supposed to have actually exists, and the reports we’ve gotten back from our face on Vidya is that, at a minimum, the Nerd Pretender thinks it does, it’s been looted from the remains of the Haganistanian Dominion.”

“And we’re not responsible for the other mechanism the Nerd Pretender is utilizing to misuse the asteroid cannon,” Inn Sano concluded. “Although we independently rediscovered it.”

Lady Critic tapped her foot. “And that would be . . . ?”

“The ancient jump-gate system,” Inn Sano explained. “Hyperdrive only dates back about seven centuries. The precursor to the Imperial system starts four centuries before that.”

“The Corporatocracy,” Lady Critic remembered aloud. “But I thought they just traveled by slow-boat under hibersleep.”

“They did, for a brief time,” Link Sano said, picking up the story. “But around the same time the first primitive ion drives replaced chemical rockets and solar sails as the primary propulsion methods, certain, ah, weak spots in the fabric of spacetime were discovered. Spots where space could be stretched, with a little encouragement. Originally, they were quite chancy; you could never be quite sure you could get back from wherever the jump point sent you. But the High Corporatocracy developed a method for controlling a jump point to a reasonable degree of accuracy, and created a network of connected jump-gates.”

“They’re actually significantly faster than hyperdrives,” Inn Sano continued. “They’re almost instantaneous. But they do have four serious flaws compared to hyperdrives. First, operating a jump-gate requires immense amounts of energy; sending a ship from Nostalgia to Vidya by jump-gate costs around ten to twenty times as much in fuel, depending on the state of the hyperspace flux. Second, about one time in fifty even a well-tuned jump-gate would misfire and connect its jump point to the wrong matching gate. This wasn’t disastrous, since you could just try again, but it cost time and more energy. Third, you can’t go where there isn’t either an already existing gate, or a naturally occurring jump point with a natural resonant frequency that matches your gate. And fourth, a gate can only handle one ship at a time, with a reset time of an hour or more between ships.”

Understanding dawned across Lady Enchik’s face. “So hyperdrive was superior except for speed,” she said, “and that only for single ships. The jump-gates were great for travel between inhabited worlds during peacetime; not so good for exploration, cargo hauling, or warfare.”

“Exactly,” Link Sano agreed. “So after the Teknocracy-Corporatocracy Schism, the jump-gate system fell into disrepair. Actually, it was starting to show signs of age and lack of maintenance before that, which might be one reason why the schism happened to begin with.”

“But it’s still out there,” Inn Sano explained. “And most major inhabited systems, at least the ones that were part of the Corporatocracy’s old territory, still have a jump-gate or two out in their Kupier belts. Someone working for the Nerd Pretender got the one at Vidya up and working again.”

“But they can send an asteroid to another system even if its gate isn’t working?” Film Brain asked, beating Jaeris by a few seconds.

“As long as it’s intact, yes,” Inn Sano replied gravely. “Only one gate has to be powered to make the jump.” He turned to face Linkara again. “Which is why we need your data. We’ve figured out how to not just tap into the jump grid, but also create artificial jump points and close existing ones. If we can pinpoint where the gate at Zord is, we can lock it, so the Pretender can’t try a repeat of the same trick.”

Linkara stared at the Sano who wore his face, eyes hard and clear. “I don’t want to trust you,” he stated, his voice low and gravelly.

Lord Spoony waved his hands. “Okay, we’re definitely getting somewhere,” he said, “but we still need to fill you guys in on the situation. You know the Nerd Pretender is up to some shady shit; you obviously figured that out before I did. Lord Critic’s behavior was never terribly stable, and it seems to be getting less and less so.”

Film Brain raised his gaze to meet Inn Sano’s. “You said you built me,” he recalled. “Did Lord Critic give you a reason why?”

The two Sanos shared a long look, as if some nonverbal communication was taking place between them. Jaeris realized it didn’t even have to be nonverbal for him to not hear it; they could be having the conversation in some other room of the station, between two different bodies - faces, they’d called them.

“Before we answer that, let us address why Lady Critic is here,” Inn Sano finally suggested. “Are you asking us to lend you our support for your bid for the Chrome Throne? It sounded earlier as if you weren’t enthusiastic about that, Lord Spoony.”

“I’m not,” Lord Spoony sighed, “but what else can I do? Without a provision for an Empress, I genuinely think every other option would be worse - for me personally, for the people of Avatar Station with whose lives I am formally responsible, and for the population of the galaxy as a whole, or at least this quadrant. I’d suck as an Emperor, but I’d be better than a civil war between two madmen. Three, if you count Dread Lord Sterling, but I don’t think anyone would ever accept him on the throne.”

Link Sano looked up, to the side, and then down, as if he were searching for a memory. “Unfortunately, neither of us are legal experts,” he noted. “But I’m sure there must be a way to accept an Empress over her incompetent brother.” He tapped at the datapad again.

“Trust me, I’ve looked,” Lady Critic huffed.

“I don’t even want a formal endorsement,” Lord Spoony continued. “Mostly what I want right now is for you guys to stop selling superweapons to the other sides, and if you can find it in you, give us some hints as to how we can disable the other superweapons or at least their power supplies.”

Link Sano looked up from the datapad, and the two Sanos stared at each other again. Finally, Link Sano nodded. “Given the current pattern of behavior,” he said, “we have reason to believe that the Nerd Pretender will eventually attempt to eliminate us, once he is convinced that the remaining mystic orders are either loyal to him or annihilated. While we had been contemplating Lord Critic as a very mildly preferable option, his lack of consistency had been bothering us. Our decision had been to ignore it for as long as possible, but it appears that is no longer a reasonable option.” He smiled softly at Lord Spoony and Linkara. “And we had agreed long ago that if our children came to us for help, we would at least attempt to be useful.”

“Consider you our emotional weakness,” Inn Sano agreed. “Which brings us back to you, Film Brain. Lord Critic didn’t bring you to us; General Phelous did.”

Film Brain digested that bit of information, swaying slightly in place. “Did he think he was going to get to keep me?” he asked.

“That was our impression at the time,” Inn Sano answered.

“But what for?” Film Brain wondered.

Inn Sano shook his head. “That, we never asked, and he never said,” he replied.

Jaeris cleared his throat. “Wouldn’t that have been right before he paid the security system at Zord a visit?” he asked. “I mean, I know you said you couldn’t hack into it when we were there, but maybe if you knew you were an Omega and had more practice?”

“Maybe,” Film Brain said, although he didn’t sound at all convinced.

“So, the superweapons,” Lady Critic prompted.

“The key to defeating the asteroid cannon is the jump-gate system,” Link Sano replied. “Without that, it can’t fire past Vidya’s own Oort cloud. If it should become necessary to besiege Vidya system itself, then we can talk about disabling its energy supply, but we can render everywhere else safe from it easily enough.”

“The disintegrator cannon is harder,” Inn Sano conceded. “Especially now that there are two of them. However, the energy drain is enormous and requires specific storage batteries and conduits. Take out the conduits and the beam is useless. It’ll be tricky, but I think it can be done.”

“Great!” Lord Spoony shouted. “Show us.”

“That’s the other problem,” Inn Sano said. “Explaining how to disable the jump-gates without a working jump-gate in front of us is more or less impossible, and we can’t really use the one by this station to practice on. We’ve made enough improvements and modifications that it’s almost not the same system.” He paused, glanced at Linkara, and then continued, “Rather than trying to teach one of you how to lock a gate, it would be preferable from our perspective to send one of our faces with you.”

Linkara glared back. “Hell, no,” he growled. “Not on my ship.”

Lady Critic looked like she was about to start giving regal orders again. Jaeris jumped in first: “Well, heck, that’s fine with me,” he said, trying to sound more jovial than he felt. “We’ll just go back to being a wing instead of a single ship. He can come on the _Stratocaster_ with me.”

Lord Spoony gave Jaeris a sly half-smile. “Tell you what,” he added, “why don’t I join you? That way we’ll have a royal on each ship, in case we need to pull some serious strings.”

Linkara looked like he’d bitten a lemon. “All right, all right,” he groaned, “I don’t want anyone more vulnerable than they have to be. I’ll let him on the ship.” He turned up his nose at the Sanos. “But I don’t have to like it,” he finished.

“No one said you had to,” Jaeris commented. That had actually been easier than he’d expected.

Now he had the means to protect his world. They just had to get back and actually carry out a reasonable plan.

A reasonable plan that was going to end up deciding who would be the new Emperor.

He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain that to Joanna.


End file.
